Hard Drives not recognized

Are they not recognized by the BIOS?

Or, can you not boot from them?

If these are new hard drives, they need to be partitioned and formatted before you can use them.

First, make sure that the BIOS recognizes the drives.

Enter BIOS setup, and verify that the drives are reported correctly.

If not, shut down and double-check the jumpers on the drives that set master and slave.
Make sure that the cable is NOT a cable select style cable.
If it is, set the drives to cable select mode, and connect the cable to the appropriate drives for master and slave.

If you are installing Windows 2000 or XP, boot from the CD and the installer will help you set up your drives.

If you are installing W98 or Me, I recommend booting from a startup floppy.
At the DOS prompt, run fdisk
Answer yes to support for large hard drives.
Create a primary DOS partition on the boot drive of the size desired.
Make sure to set the partition as active.

If there is drive space left over, create an Extended DOS partition.
Create logical drives as desired.

Exit fdisk and re-boot.
Format at least the C: (boot) drive.
I use format c: /s
the 's' switch copies the system files and makes the drive bootable.

Once the drive is formatted, switch to your CD drive and run setup to install Windows.

If your hard drive is larger than 137GB, you need Windows XP service pack 1 to be able to recognize the drive properly.

If this does not help. Please post your system specifications and exactly what point the drives are not recognized.

Chas

First of all make sure that jumpers &
cables are set correctly, Inorder to
boot from the hard drive you better make
it as a PRIMARY MASTER, and make the
partition using FDISK utility & latter
format it. Also sometime when u attach the
hardisk more than 32 GB to some old mother board's basically PII's they will not
detect the harddrive, you need to limit the
drive to 32 GB for Drives with greater
storage capacity. Try & Post

malkeet