My friend recently bought a new hard drive and I installed it for him as a secondary.

I took his old 15G hard drive, that was in perfect working condition, and switch the jumpers to slave. I hook it all up, master to master and slave to slave. Power it up and get a no operating system found.

The first time this happened I flipped out and thought I had jacked up my original hard drive. So I rip everything apart and plug up only the master, my original HD and power it back up. Everything runs perfect.

I switch the jumpers around on the secondary so that it is set for master, keeping my HD out of it, I power it up. No operating system found again. I know the little 15G HD is wiped so this is to be expected.

I then switch it back to slave, put in my HD and power it all back up and I get no operating system found. So the only logical solution I can come up with is that it is reading the slave as the master. I don't know how this is possible since I have the master jumpered to master and plugged in with the "Master" end of the IDE cable.

For now I have just taken the 15G HD out of the loop. Any help or ideas would be appreciated

BTW the computer is a HP Pavillion 511w walmart special. I have done some adding here and there but nothing to hardcore

Could you clarify? I didn't read where you installed an operating system on the new hard drive or if you even formatted it.

There is no OS on the secondary. I had already wiped it. I shouldn't have to have an OS installed on it just to use it as slave storage should I?

No, not if you are going to use it as storage but it isn't clear to me that you installed Windows on either drive. So to be clear, the new drive which is set as the new master has Windows installed and the old 15GB hard drive is now set as slave and is used as storage? And even though you installed Windows on the new master hard drive, you still get no operating system found? Is that what is happening?

Perhaps I stated it wrong. I have a drive already that I have had and runs perfect. I took my friends old 15G and put it to slave and hooked it in. The computer says "no operating system found" when I do this. When I take the slave part of the IDE cable from the spare HD It finds windows and runs perfect once again.

1st HD - My original, Set to master on jumpers, hooked to the IDE cable as master - Windows XP is installed and has been for quite some time

2nd HD - Friends old 15G, set to slave on jumpers, hooked to slave on IDE cable

Some BIOSs have a setting to chose which hard drive is the first bootable drive. Check the BIOS and make sure the proper hard drive is selected. If that doesn't apply or you can't make it work, try setting both drives to Cable Select and see if that helps.

I will take a look at the bios first thing tomorrow. It's too late for me to be fiddling with everything under the hood so to speak. Just out of curiosity though, shouldn't it already be set to my HD. I am still using my original HD as the master.

It shouldn't have changed, I agree, although it might have later when you were experimenting and had the 15GB drive installed alone and then reinstalled the original drive later. Anyway, you're just checking to be sure and it costs nothing.