Help with Windows

[Weasel]

OK - I have a computer I can use.. I have installed the HD's from my old warhorse into a system running XP (I had win98 before)

the new system is not recognizing either of muy old HD's.. in Win98, it would see all drives that the BIOS setup could see, and the drives would be active..

In this XP, the BIOS sees the drives.. one of them should need to be reformatted.. the other should be OK as is was a slave.. but XP does not see them.. and the drive assignment remain as they were before with only 1 local disk © and a CD-RW (d)..

The CD should be E, and there should be a D and F Hard drive showing..

Suggestions??

-Greybeard

Ok, from your explanation above I take it you had a system with a C drive that was formatted with XP. Just sticking the old drives into the computer will not allow XP to recognize them. Try the following from the HELP section of XP:

"Cause:

The disk does not contain a valid signature. After you install a new disk, Windows XP must write a disk signature, the end of sector marker (also called signature word), and a master boot record or GUID partition table before you can create partitions on the disk. When you first start Disk Management after installing a new disk, a wizard providing a list of the new disks detected by Windows XP is displayed. If you cancel the wizard before the disk signature is written, the disk status remains Not Initialized.

Solution:

Initialize the disk. The disk status briefly changes to Initializing and then Healthy status. For instructions describing how to initialize a disk, see To initialize new disks.

To initialize new disks
Open Computer Management (Local).
In the console tree, click Disk Management.
Where?

Computer Management (Local)
Storage
Disk Management

Right-click the disk you want to initialize, and then click Initialize Disk.
In the Initialize Disk dialog box, select the disk(s) to initialize.
If you are running Windows XP 64-Bit Edition, you can select whether to use the master boot record (MBR) or GUID partition table (GPT) partition style.

The disk is initialized as a basic disk.

Notes

To open Computer Management, click Start, and then click Control Panel. Double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Computer Management.
You must be logged on as an administrator or a member of the Administrators group in order to complete this procedure. If your computer is connected to a network, network policy settings may also prevent you from completing this procedure.
New disks appear as Not Initialized. Before you can use a disk, you must first initialize it. If you start Disk Management after adding a disk, the Initialize Disk Wizard appears so you can initialize the disk. "

Try that.