Configuring New Hard drives

Ok this is staring at me in the face but I am so pisses off and tired I thought I'd ask then go to sleep. Putting a new <aster hard drive in a computer. No other hard drive in it. I load it up and during boot up sequence it shows no hard drive. Except when you get past the first part of bootup you then see the motherboards screen which shows the Primary master (Maxtor 40gig) I figured it sees it one place everything is cool. Start loading windows (bootup disc first) and then it says put in CD with Operating system in CD Rom, no problem. Then it says "Can't load Windows XX becaue no freaking hard drive is present on machine! It see's it on moherboard manufactoring screen but not initially on first page of bootup. I go to CMOS screen on bootup to see what the settings are and it again shows no hard drive and I can't change the settings. I just see IDE HDD Auto Detection
IDE Primary master Auto
Access Mode Auto

The down you see Capacity 0 MB
Cylinder 0
Precomp 0
Landing Zone 0
Sector 0

Also when I justt tried to soft boot it now gives me a Primary Hard disk error
I have the Hard disk on 1 IDE by itself
CDRom and Burner daisey chained on one IDE and 3.5 floppy by itself on another. Any ideas as to change the configuration of IDE's and drives? I want to load Windows XP straight from the CD eventually. HELP!!!

 

How old is your motherboard? (Or really your IDE Board)

Hard Drives with more than a certain number of cylinders are not readable by older IDE Boards without special software. Dunno if this is related or not. I bought a 40Gb and it came with "EZBIOS" to allow my system to see the thing. EZBIOS boots first, then the OS. If I wanted to boot from Floppy or CD, I'd boot normally then interrupt (as opposed to just sticking a Floppy in the drive and rebooting) so that EZBIOS could initialize.

Did your HD come with any software?

 

Thanks

Motherboard is relatively young (as far as ever changing technology) 2 years max. It has 5 spots that fit the ribbon cables from CDRoms hard drives etc. I think it is 4 IDE's and one other (PCI? maybe) It doesn't make sence that the motherboard would see it but that bios does recognize it. I know it's a simple settin change but my novice abilities can't figure it ot yet. I have a friend who is alot more PC savey than I am but I am trying first to do it myself before calling 911, him.

 

I don't know what version of Windows you're attempting to load, but it could be that you need to create a partition on the drive in order to get past that 'no drive detected' thing. NT, 2000, and XP provide the option to create one, but I know 95 and 98 don't. I've never installed ME, but I'm guessing it doesn't either.

The partition can occupy the entire disk space, if you like.

 

XP

I am going to start over and plug data ribbon to IDE 1 and the see if it appears on initial bootup screen. Then from there CDRom and so on

 

YEAH!!!

Between a data cable evidently having a snap in there and a save and exit that I must have missed, new hard drive is formating and Windows XP is about ready to go. If you ever need a hard drive buy a Maxtor. Jake in customer service walked me through the whole process and was great!