I just finished building a new system from scratch. I have connected a new West. Digital 80 Gig Hard drive as my primary (master) IDE1. My CDrom is master IDE2. When I try to boot the windows XP install disk (for new machines), it says that it can't find a hard drive and must abort. I've checked the CMOS setup and it's seeing the drive correctly. I've even ran the utilities that WD supplies to troubleshoot the drive and everything is ok. I've even called WD's customer support and they said it's a windows thing - to call Microsoft (yeah right) This is the only HD I have, so I need to make it work. Any suggestions for getting windows to see it and format it?

For grins and giggles, try setting both drives to cable select. Or, try setting them on the same channel, HD as master and CD as slave. Wait, if the CD is on a different channel, make sure the HD is set to Master w/o slave, instead of master with slave attatched. ----paxcirc.a-

Did WD support mention anything about jumper settings? If the drive is the only HD on your system, set the jumper to cable select. Check your motherboard manual for an "auto-detect" setting. If that still doesn't work, try the master jumper setting, set the hd in the bios to master.

He said his cmos recognizes the hardrive so it must be hooked up okay. Xp is not seeing it. I would check in your bios under the boot order. Make sure you have the first boot device to the cdrom and the second boot device to ide 0 which would be the hardrive. Maybe you selected ide1 as your hardrive and it is supposed to be ide0. Make sure apic is enabled in bios. Good Luck