I hooked the sucker up with the jumpers set to slave and the ide and power cables in. After the beginning bios info all I get is a dark screen. Waited five minutes. Still nothing. Started again and went into bios. It's still where I set it to auto configure but no evidence of the new drive. Then I put a dos boot disk in and got out of bios. Got my A prompt and ran fdisk. No change drive option (#5)even listed. Checked display partition information(#4). All it showed was my old drive. Shut the computer down, disconnected cables, and powered up as usual and here I am. I think this drive is supposed to work in my machine. It's the same brand, Quantum Fireball, as my factory installed master hdd and according to Gateway, not too big for my motherboard. Help!

Hooked it up as a slave to what? If the master is jumpered as a SINGLE drive, the slave may not be detected. If you are using CABLE SELECT on the master, the slave may not be detected. It is hard to hook it up wrong, but I have used cables that could go either way. Is the red stripe of the ide cable next to the power connector?

Get into the BIOS, go to "Standard CMOS Setup" & make sure your drive's "type" & "mode" are set to AUTO. Then go to "IDE Auto Detection" & hit "Y" to accept the drive parameters. Make sure to SAVE before you exit If that doesn't fix it, you either have the master/slave jumpers set incorrectly, or you have your IDE cabling messed up. There is no turning back, now that you've woken up the demon in me...

BTW, cable select is for pussies...don't use it! There is no turning back, now that you've woken up the demon in me...

The only 2 options in my bios for primary ide slave is type which has always been set at auto and 32bit I/O which is enabled. I'm sure the jumpers are set right and the ide and power cables are plugged in correctly. Could this just be a bad drive?

There should be another menu option on the main CMOS window...it will be something like "IDE HDD AUTO DETECTION"...select that option & hit the letter "Y" to confirm the drives that are detected There is no turning back, now that you've woken up the demon in me...

It turned out to be the jumper. Called maxtor and they said slave setting is no jumper at all.