Hey,

I am not very wise and knowledgeable about the hardware side of the pc and not sure what this problem could be but i hope it can be fixed. This is what happened

I went round my brothers to install windows xp and i booted up from disk then it asked me if i wanted to partition the drives (my brother has 2 hard-drives, 1 is 10GB and the other 20GB) and i wasent 100% sure what to do as ive never done this b4 but i paritioned both of them and i think all data was wiped off. Then i clicked to install xp on 1 of them then it formatted that drive, and all went well and xp was installed.

Then i looked at the other hard drive and clicked on it and it wouldent let me open it unless i formatted it, so i thought fine, and i did and as it was about 1/4 done it crashed and a blue screen came up with alot of info on, some or most i cant remember, but i restarted the machine and the IDE primary master was none and also the secondary master was none and it was booting up from cd as a 3rd option.

I knew something bad had happened as i went into setup mode by pushing delete and i tried to dectect the hard-drives but none could be found. So looking around in set-up mode for ages looking for ways to get it to dectect the hard-drives but no luck. I just hoped i havent fryed the IDE or the hard-drives.

I know nothing about this kind of thing or even for that matter what a IDE is, but i did allow the xp cd to run after as i coulent do anything else and when it tried to detect the hard-drives on installation it could not detect them

Can anyone help or give any insight as to what may have happened and anyways it can be fixed?

Thanks Guys
Mike

I don't think you fried it but if you partioned and formatted I am pretty sure everything is wiped from the hard drive. Go into the bios and see if that is detecting the hard drives. I don't think you can fry an ide from windows installation.