I added a second used hard drive in my computer. BIOS recognizes it as secondary slave. I have tried to initialize it using Xp's Disk Management, but to no avail. In Component Management I can find it in the Device Manager, but when I try to initialize, format, or partition it, I get a message that tells me that in order to initialize the hard drive I need to restart my computer. I did that and it didn't help. Does anyone have any ideas? Thanks! Your help is greatly appreciated. Joel

Probably because of the jumper settings. If both drives are set to cable select, it can sometimes confuse the BIOS, the OS, or both. Try setting the primary to master, and the secondary to slave via the jumpers on the HD. If this doesn't help, let me know.

Did you double check that your data cable isn't reversed? Red wire should go to #1 pin on the HD. How are you trying to format the slave, through the XP OS disk? Power down. Unplug the power cable from your Master HD (you can leave the data cable in). Make sure the slave has the data and power cables correctly plugged in. Insert a WIN98 floppy and reboot. Does the floppy recognize the slave? It should start the formatting process by asking you if you want large disk support, etc. Make sure you "want to start with CDROM support" enabled. After you get the DOS prompt, go into Fdisk and delete all partitions thus hosing the disk. Remove the floppy, and insert your XP system disk and reboot. Now the disk should fire up and start the XP install process. you don't have to install XP, just format in the file system that your master is formatted in and you are set. Make sure your slave isn't set to Cable Select-I went around in circles for two hours once that way unit I set it to Slave and changed the round cable to the traditional flat.

Windows XP SUCKS, install Windows 2000 and most of your problems will be gone.