Can't detect my Hard disk

1. Make sure that the boot drive is set to master with slave present.

2. Make sure that the BIOS is set to auto-detect all hard drives.

3. Try connecting the Seagate drive as the master drive on the secondary IDE channel.
I have seen some drives that will not work together as master and slave.

4. Is is possible that the Seagate drive was setup with drive overlay software?
If so, the software MUST be installed on the boot drive in order to access the Seagate drive.
You might be able to recover the drive using 3rd party software such as Partition Magic.

Chas

install this hd only

replace your ribbon cable from motherboard to hd

be sure to connect hd to the last connector on the cable

set hd to master

reboot and good luck, it may be a bad cable

Remove the drive and reinstall. Make sure the ribon cable that connects to the hard drive has the colored stripe on the side that the power connector goes in. The colored stripe is for pin one. If the ribbon cable has a colorer end make sure that's connected to the mother board. If the drive is connected alone it should be jumpered single or master. When you boot the computer go into the BIOS and select auto detect. Does the drive spin up and make any sounds? If the sounds are clunking noises then the drive may be damaged. But check your installation to make sure all the connections are correct and you should be fine.

When you say "new PC", what O/S and filesystem was being used on the old PC. If you were using WIN2000 or WINXP on the old PC and are now trying to restore to a PC running an older version of Windows that does not support NTFS such as WIN95, WIN98, WINME, etc, you will not be able to see the HDD as the filesystems are incompatible.

Install this drive as the master with no other drives on the system

Boot a floppy.

If the system will not recognize the drive. Shut down and try the drive on a second system.

Good Luck Lee

first, is the 40g the only drive? or a secondary. do you remember the file system (fat,fat32,ntsf)?, new cable?,put on "primary IDE" on motherboard?, I have 5 hard drives, 2 cd-rw/dvd-rw-roms and a zip drive all of them are jumpered to cable select and never had problems..ok I cheated I have an extra IDE card installed but still...if you have 2 hard drives, and you have say XP on the new drive, (jumpers to CS) add you 40G on the 2nd on the cable,once done you should be able to read and get those files off. I have had do to that because some one deleted there windows (OS) but left everything elce so I had to go in and get all the files they needed and made them very happy, so I know it can be done with out too much trouble!

not sure if you're still reading this, but:

one thing you could try is to install this hard drive by itself and REMOVE THE JUMPER COMPLETELY.

if the message you are getting is something along the lines of "Primary Master Fail", then this will fix your problem.

This only works when the hard drive is the only device on the cable.

give it a shot. if that works, you have a base to proceed from.