I am trying to fit a new hard drive i have put the hard drive in and the computer has recognised the new one (i think) i was trying to boot up from the boot disk and it told me it detected the hard drives then is stopped and it requires a commande it has A:\> but i am not sure which commande to put in i wonder if anybody can help me its xp professional i am trying to put on it i have the boot up disk in the floppy drive and the xp disk in the cd rom drive thanks if you can help Gilly

If the computer bios is dated after June 1999, it should recognise the 60 Go drive and any drive above 32 Go up to 137 Go.The install diskette from the manuacturer will install the drive and format it for OS installation in a few minutes.You will get one primary partition set active with the type of partition you look for: NTFS or FAT 32.These diskettes work very well and install the drive, recognised or not by the bios.It eliminates the need to use fdisk, a tool to make partitions that is related too closely to one OS and does not cover necessarily the hard drive on hand because of inherent limits built into it.Use the install tool that matches your brand and model.When a drive is not recognised by the bios, you use the user defined drive with 1023 cyl.,16 hds, and 63 sec.You select a mode for the drive usually LBA Disabled(d i s a b l e d ).This trick will let the computer boot and the install diskette will setup the drive. Good luck.

I think that what you have is: 1) A HDD with an OS installed (Old C: Drive) 2) A new HDD installed as D:, but as yet, unformatted. And that what you are intending is to re-install WinXP Pro. WHY? - Isn't XP installed on your FIRST (OLD) HDD? - If so, the System should boot as normal and then you can Partition / Format the new HDD using the usual tools. However, if you have TWO EMPTY, UNFORMATTED HDD, then the PC is waiting after Boot, for you to tell it "SETUP" and thus commence the process of installing WinXP Pro. If I remember correctly, XP needs more than just the ONE Floppy to commence the install, but some Systems allow for BOOT TO CD, and if yours does, then Booting to the CDROM should start your XP setup for you. Baldy.