I your hardrive is doing all of this then every one is right, the drive is going to die soon,
just look for a utitlity called UltimateBootDisk and under the options for hardisk's choose the hitachi...

if the cd-rom is being picked up in windows and you can open and close it, but it cannot read cd's i guess the lazy os damaged or something.

How did u get ur cd out in the first place?

the SATA is very different from the ATA, SATA does not use IDE cables, its got its own connector.

This is correct bcoz win98 cannot read NTFS only FAT and FAT32, and b4 you install 98 take out the 40 gig and leave the on and just install 98 and format using FAT32

Well in some mother boards u dont need to install SATA drivers, like INtel boards dont need u to put in the drivers

Put the hardrive in and it should pick up fine

my Techical Manager told me if u LED is on all the time and does not switch of, it means ur cd drive is finished.

this has happened to me also, open the tray with a pin, then close it again then reboot the machine, if that doesnt work your cd drive is wasted

yha, u should be able to boot from that old hardrive, if u havent formated the old one.

if ur power supply is so crapy why dont u just buy a new one.

The legend has spoken(Cat) so now i think your problem should be solved

if u already have a hardrive with windows on it u wont have to re install xp

installing a new harddrive should be easy if u know what u are doing, IF u know how jumper settings operate u should be cool,

why do u want to go into bios, if u dont know what u r doing there u...

If i low level formatt, is it possible to for someone to retrieve my data on my drive all of it.

good thing you thought of that, otherwise you would have wasted ur money

i suggest you get a new optical drive, bcoz i dont things ur 2 drives are working,

To check if ur IDE cable is working, put ur hardrive on that cable, and if it works then its definetly ur...

So what could the problem be?
Can you give me an answer?

i have movies/ music/ all type of files,, my drive has no errors i checked it

i have a 160 gig drive hitachi,

my drive has 4 partitions, c-d-e-f the problem i am having is that partition f does not show on some computers, and shows on other computers, partition f does...

I would have to agree with RGPHNX, calll Maxtor, the drive is probaly faulty

1 - Restart Your PC and try to boot from CD
If that works there is something wrong in ur windows installation try and re-install
ur drivers.

2 - If it does not boot from CD at all then...

Im trying to get this right, you say they both arent working. My last ? is did they both stop reading cd's at the same time?

i would go for SATA drives for now because some motherboards these days come out with only one IDE slot on the board. and more SATA slots for raid and stuff.

i used seatools and found lots of errors on the drive so i think i should just throw it away or put it in the freezer. lol

Did ur drives work b4, when did the problem start, did u install any new software or hadrives.

i faced a similar problem, firstly on the IDE cable. the first connector must go with the master cd...

its not a new hard drive... What im saying is that you cannot access the drive. it was working fine until a few weeks ago, u can see the drive in device manager but no where else.

you cannot access the hard drive from any where including xp setup so formating i\does not work

my hardrive shows in post, shows in device manager, but does not show any where else. eg My Computer, Disk Defragment it does not show in all these things.

every 1 should read this THREAD,

Are there anymore crazy ways of fixing PC problems