Hello Everyone, My mother bought a used pc the other day and asked me to look at it and possably advise her what she needed to update it and get her ready to go online hassel free. I looked her pc over and had her buy a hard drive as for it only had a 4 gig, other then that everything else looked ok. She bought an 80gig Seagate HD, without using my head and reading the instructions, I unplugged her pc, opend it up and installed the new HD leaving the old 4gig as it was. ( working and with windows ME as the OS.) thinking that I would install XP on the new HD and she could use the 4gig for storage. Without running the disk wizard that came with the new HD, I even screwed up more, I forgot to set the jumpers to make the 4gig the slave and the new 80 the master. After putting the pc back together I booted it up, the normal black screen appeared displaying the system info, but it did not detect either HD or proceed past this black screen, then I realized I had screwed up. I took the 80 out and put the pc as it was before I started, booted it up and the black screen appeared and this time detected the 4gig HD but would not boot up the OS, I rebooted several more times, still the same. I took the 80gig home to my pc and insatlled Windows XP Home on it, took the 4gig totally out and installed the 80 in place of it hoping this would be the fix, still the same black screen and it did detect the 80gig, still nothing further. I then learned that her pc being a 200MHz could not run XP, I put 98 second editon on the 80gig, still no luck.I am not really sure how bad I have screwed this pc up but I am lost to what to do. This is exactly what the black screen says: PhoenixBIOS 4.0 Release 6.0 Copyright 1985-1997 Phoenix Technologies LTD. All Rights Reserved 4A3NT0X0.86A0047.P03.9705151716 Intel Corporation AN430TX Motherboard Serial Number: IVAN89199185 Pentium Processor with MMX technology 200 MHz 0000640K System RAM Passed 0512K Cache SRAM Passed System BIOS shadowed Video BIOS shadowed UMB upper limit segment address: F081 Keyboard Detcted Fixed Disk:0: ST380011A ATAPI CD-ROM: CD-956B Press <F2> to enter SETUP I press <F2> and it will then say Entering SETUP but it never does anything else. The 80 and the 4 gig work perfect in my machine so I know they are good. I took and formated the 80gig back to it origanal blank state and tried running the disk wizard that came with it, still nothing. I cannot get past this black screen. Any and all help with this is greatly appreciated. My mom only wants to check e-mail and surf a little so she don't need anything real fast or special and an 80gig was on a great sale so she got it. I would just like to get her up and going again. The computer is a CompUSA. THANK YOU.

You will have problems getting a P200 to recgonise the 80GB dirve. More likely than not, it will only see the first 8GB. If you were to go to the manufacturer's web site, you could download their overlay software. Then you would be able to partition the drive. Or at least much of it. When you had both drives set as master the computer will not recognise either one as they both respond at the same time causing confusion. I'm guessing that you then set the original drive to slave. Win98 wants to boot from the primary master. Always install an operating system on the computer in which it is to run. The install routine looks at the hardware present and configures itself to match the computer. Even if you add the drivers for the correct machine, you'll still have the 'old' drivers floating around.

It never ceases to amaze me that otherwise seemingly sensible people who would not, for instance, undertake knee surgery with a rusty pair of vise-grips, will gleefully barge into a computer repair. If you haven't fried anything yet, you would peobably do well to take this box to a shop. M2

"...and it did detect the 80gig,.." Was it detected correctly? (Full 80GB?) Can you boot the machine with a bootdisk? To add a bit to what was mentioned earlier, different bios's may assign different parameters to a hard disk. Some bios's have an IDE Auto Detect function which can provide up to three sets of disk parameters for one disk. (This is different from having the AUTO setting on a particular IDE device.) Therefore (as mentioned above) always set up the drive in the machine it will reside in.

okay put the 4 gb back in and be patient. i just worked on a dell 450mhz that when putting a second hd in to move data it took 5 minutes for the bios to let me into setup then tell it that ide 2 was no longer to be set to off. then 10 minutes for it to boot and see the new drive have you actually left it on walked away and waited to see if it will boot. it might take some time for it to detect the changes and set them in bios Athlon xp 2500+ @2.17 pc 3200 512mb ram radeon 9200se win xp home oem

Thank You everyone for your replies. First off I do not know if it detected the full 80 gigs or not, the only message I got letting me know it detected the HD was: Fixed Disk:0: ST380011A which was displayed on the black screen I am stuck on. As for using a boot disk, tried and failed. At this point I relize that the 80gig is a bit too much for this pc and I am going to stick with the 4gig and once I can get it to boot the OS up like normal, stay content with it as it is. Simon your idea is one I have not tried yet, after posting this I will try your method, it makes sence. Now that I think of it, after pressing <F2> and then it saying Entering SETUP, I could hear the fan spin and the HD as if it were doing something. Thank You all again.