On a Compaq Presario 5461, I am trying to install a 2nd HD. On starting up I press F10 and bring up the bios screen.. However, ther is no indication of a HD or even the cdrom that is installed. Why are these not displaying?

Have you done the IDE autodetection when you enter the bios.

More information please. Is the second hard drive partitioned? Is it set to primary slave, seconadary master, secondary slave,? Where is it installed in the master/slave setup? Are the jumpers correct for the master slave settings? Did you try a win98 boot disk to use fdisk to see if it is there? More information please.

I put my second drives on the secondary and make them the master-with-slave-present. I then make the CDROM drive a slave. You never see a CDROM drive in the BIOS screen because the BIOS does not handle CDROM drives. As a rule-of-thumb, any external device that has a driver is not itself handled by the BIOS.

I beg to differ with you bill2 but all 3 of my cd rom drives shows up in the bios. That is how I auto-detected them. They also show up on the boot up screen with the makes/models right under my master hard drive information for the 40G hard drive. So how are you not seeing yours?

The drive may need to have the jumpers configured correctly. If it is the second drive on the primary IDE be jumpered as "Slave" If it is on the secondary IDE and is the only drive jumper it as master. If the CD-Rom or another drive is on the secondary IDE, you will have to see wether it is Master or Slave and jumper this drive accordingly. If the other drive is master - make the new one a Slave. and vice-versa Then in the BIOS setup, use the 'IDE Auto-Detect' and svae the new settings at exit. To use the drive, it may need to be 'Fdisked and Formatted" If Windows does not see the drive, it has to be FDISKED. Windows see's "Partitions" the BIOS see's "Drives" After partitioning with 'Fdisk' you have to format the drive. It is then ready to use. HTH