Another possibilty is that the drive is not correct reconised in the BIOS. There are tricks to reduce the amount of cylinders below 1024 (called LBA). It's all hard to say withour further information about Mainbord and Operating System. A tool to detect most of your hardware is Everest (from lavalys). they stopped support on their free version but you can still download it at http://www.majorgeeks.com/download4181.html With this program you can most of the information you need. Otherwise unplug all harddrives, place the new one. Install your PC from CD (or DVD). And the place the old one as Slave. Your computer will work a lot faster, but you have work for days to install (and setup) all needed programs.

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Make sure you aren't using an operating system that can only support a limited hard disk (Windows 98) If you are using Windows XP, try disconnecting your first hard drive, put the second in it's place, and see if that works.
Assuming your first HDD is the master HDD, make sure your second HDD is set to be a slave hard disk. Two master hard drives can cause alot of trouble. If none of those work, keep your first hard drive out, get a boot disk (I reccommend a Windows XP boot disk) and try using Fdisk on it and reformat it. If you are still having problems, I recommend a full reformat. There are programs that will completly wipe out your harddrive, more than the Windows boot disk will, this should fix it, if it doesn't, it is not your hardware.

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i put in a second hard drive that has xp on it
Harddisk Problem

I put in a second hard drive in my computer but it still has xp on it so when connected system wont boot as there are two operating systems how can I format second drive when I cant get in

-reply by timmo

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