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with my new HDD im having trouble with it getting recognized by the BIOS. on the hard drive i already have it formatted with the XP software and when i start it up i cant get passed the bios because the HDD is not recognized. is there anything i can do to get it recognized?

what brand of hard drive, how large, and isit IDE or sata?

also what is your motherboard?

is a western digital, 80 gig, and its IDE.

as for the motherboard i dont know

Did you set the jumpers on the back of the drive to the appropriate setting? You can try Cable Select, but I'd recommend setting to to Master or Slave depending on where on the IDE cable it is going.

BTW
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how did you get the OS on the drive ,if from another pc you will have problems.
if you installed from this machine and now you can't access check power cables first just move to another cable if you can
can try reset cmos unplug power and jumper the cmos then
cmos jumper 1-2 while running normal 2-3 reset for 40 secs or so,put back to 1-2.
add power turn on machine
machine may prompt to go to bios becuase of change
go there and select reset to optimum default settings
if that fails
I have experianced some dells IDE chipsets fail and you can try moving drive to 2nd connection as master, this is also a sign of failing motherboard capacitors
make sure drive is at the end of cable,if newer drive also make sure you use the 80 wire 40 pin cable connector
some pc's cd or dvd drive cables are the older type