just recently i ordered a new hard drive, and just found out its an OEM Drive only. was wondering what an OEM Drive is and if it will connect to an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ since im not finding a place to connect the ribbon or power supply.

Original Equipment Manufacturer ,eg. Dell,H.P.Buy these from people like maxtor in mass quantities. it basically means that there are not extra goodies such as software and owner's manuals with the hardware you purchased and a shorter warrantee.
Just look at the label on the Drive .There should be information on who made it and a model # then you can go to their site if you need any software.But you should see it's configuration numbers on the faceplate tabs to enter into the bios manually if the bios does not auto configure it.
However, do you not see an area on the smallest side with little brass pins sticking out?
If you do not I do not know what you bought , but it is not a complete ide internal Harddrive.

thats the mistake i think i made, didnt notice that the desicription of the drive said it was a serial interface, so it has no IDE connection. im just gonna hope that theyll take it back in return for an IDE drive of the same type and such.

Your Mb model is not in your Profile but before you exchange , if your Mb can handle serial why not plop it in .SATA runs much faster than 100 ATA.

the connection for the serial drive is much different from what im using. right now i have 2 seagate drives, im guessing both are IDE, theyre both 40gb, and can have the hard drive ribbon and the power supply hooked up. but the serial drive is a maxtor with no place for a power supply or ribbon connection.

i have attached 2 pictures, the first one is the Maxtor serial drive and the second is the seagate IDE drive

If your motherboard doesn't have SATA connectors you can either get a SATA PCI controller card or you can return the SATA drive for an IDE one. The problem you might have with the latter is having to install your new IDE drive on the same IDE cable as your DVD/CD-RW drive since you already have 2 IDE devices on the primary channel.

If you install the new IDE drive with a CD-Rom of some sort, since all the IDE devices on the same cable will be set to the same speed in this case the CD-Rom, transfers might turn out to be very slow with that HDD as a result.

it doesnt look like there are SATA connections, but then again to be honest i wouldnt know what they look like, but its probably common sense if i saw them and noticed that they matched the connections on the drive. if i can exchange for an IDE drive and just run off that one drive, there shouldnt be to much complication right? the most work that would be done is to install windows and such. but if thats not possible, guess the only option is to copy what i wanna keep and format. which wouldnt be much different from starting with a fresh new drive anyway.

What kind of mother board do you have? If it was made within the last year, it probably has a pair of SATA connectors on it. They are very nondescript where as they only appear to be a few pins sticking up, which is a striking contrast from IDE & SCSI connectors. SATA rocks! It's faster than IDE.

i believe its from a couple years ago, so it probably wouldnt have the SATA connectors, i know amd athlons are up to 3000, and ive only got a 2000, so ill figure somethin out. right now the plan is to format the computer and go from there. thx guys