Pc is a Dell Optiplex Gx1 350L Bios Revision A02 The pc was originally set up on a LAN and had no hard drive. Am trying to install a Seagate ST31621A but have been unable to get Bios to recognise it. The link is set to Master and I have tried several Bios entries. I can load Dos from a bootdisk and have Fdisk'd and formatted C: (how this is possible when Bios hasn't recognised C: I don't understand). The messages I get are: Primary hard disk drive 1 not found Seconday had disk drive 1 not found Press F1 to continue or F2 to enter Setup F1 allows Dos to be installed from A: but when I go to the Win Setup file on cd all sorts of funnies occur including Scandisk picking up lots of damaged clusters (only once this happened & Format gave a clean bill of health. I think this is a smokescreen for some other problem). Could there be a problem with Logical Block Addressing??

have you tried the hard disk in both the primary and secondary controllers? also tried a different IDE cable? use the 'auto detect hard disks' option in your BIOS if you have one, or just go to the CMOS menu and change every line to AUTO. Don't try putting it in manually. AMD Athlon XP 1.8GHz 512MB RAM 120GB HDD SATA 12GB HDD IDE GeForce 4 Ti4600 128MB Nvidia nforce2 chipset w/ soundstorm Pioneer DVD/RW ABIT NF-7S Rev 2 Motherboard

"trying to install a Seagate ST31621A but have been unable to get Bios to recognise it." -Is this a new harddrive or old? If old, how old? Can you try it in another system? "The link is set to Master and I have tried several Bios entries." -By link I assume you mean the jumper, right? "I can load Dos from a bootdisk and have Fdisk'd and formatted C: (how this is possible when Bios hasn't recognised C: I don't understand)." -Did you check before formatting if there were files on that C partition? If you booted with a Win98 it will assign it's ramdrive to a letter which comes available first. So if you formatted that, I don't think you formatted your harddisk. I also believe that that's where your problem lies with the error messages. I could be on the wrong track here, since Im just here and you are there. So feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. Do you have any optical drives connected to your pc which are not recognized by BIOS also? Intel P4 3.2E Ghz@ 3.8Ghz Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Kingston 2GB PC3200 D-Channel Asus AX800 Pro w/Zalman ZM80D-HP WD Caviar 160 GB WD Raptor 37 GB Zalman Reserator 1

One thing I though I might add, clear the CMOS. Do not type anything in this space.

The hard drive might be to large for the Bios to recognize. If you have the option to manually set the drive size, try setting it to: 1024 Cylinders 256 Heads 63 Sectors/track. With 512 bytes/sector this counts up to 8 GB