well i bought a new hard drive (MAXTOR 7L250S0 MAXLINE III 250GB 7200RPM 16MB CACHE SATA ROHS) and tried to install it, i put it, plug the sata red cable into the HD and into the 2nd slot on my mobo (the first slot is my Western Digital Caviar WD1200JD 120GB Hard Drive) start up the computer it shows both the hard drives after the *press f4 to enter raid utility* and it goes into windows like normally, however the 2nd hd is not there, it is under device manager tho. So i try shutting down and switching cables and then switching the jumper on the WD HDD and in the end, now i cant even start my windows XP at all. I screwed around in bios settings and still nothing, the computer right now is exactly how it was before the 2nd HDD was tried to put it, except i might have changed bios settings. The WD HDD is showing up after the *press f4 to enter raid utility* message and then it just sits at the black screen saying "Verifying DMI Pool Data................." and wont start up. My bios settings are set to SATA for first boot device. Im stuck here, i have no clue whats going on :( below are my system specs any help or suggestions are apprecited. I also tried starting up with just the 1 SATA hDD connected and no IDE drives, no luck. Asus A7N8X Deluxe Athlon XP 2400+ OCZ DDR400 PC3200 512MB Windows XP SP1 Maxtor Maxline III 7L250S0 250GB Hard Drive Serial ATA-150, 7,200 RPM, 16MB WD 1200JD 120gb Hard Drive Serial ATA-150, 7200 RPM, 8MB Maxtor 6Y060L0 DiamondMax Plus 9 6Y060L0 60GB Ultra ATA/133 7200RPM Hard Drive IBM Deskstar 75GXP (DTLA 307020) 20GB HDD Pioneer DVDrw dvr-105

Restore the cables to the way they were originally. The new drive will not show up in my computer until you partition/format it. Go to the Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. If you see the drive there, right click it and select Format. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

thats not the problem anymore, the problem is my old HD wont load up anymore! i see it after the boot screen but it wont start XP like it used to, and everything is changed to the way it was

Swapping the drives caused this problem. You need to boot from the XP install CD and repair the damage. I would suggest doing a 'Repair' install. Do not use the first 'repair' option. Select 'install' and then 'repair'. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

windows doesnt detect any HDDs installed, thats the problem, i cant do a repair install windows xp doesnt see my old hdd anymore :( anyone?

Well, for starts, you should check the hdd's and make sure the master drive you want is selected manually on the drive (typically there is a two-prong pin joiner) read the diagram that is posted on them all.. manually remove the pin and put it over "Master" for the drive you want to boot from.. then the other drive that you just want for data, etc.. put that to "Slave" with the two-prong pin connector. Then, when you bootup, your bios should recognise the drives as you have manually/physically configured them. Then, you should be fine with Windows bootup. Make sure that the window's installation you do use is on the master drive. -brad