Well, you guys are going to hate me.

I've got two computers that need repairs (I'm the tech guy home from college and family expects it to be done).

One is an HP, almost-legacy age (5-6) years and on boot-up, does not recognize the hard-drive, I'm not sure if master or slave settings are incorrect, but I will need to double check that. Assuming they are, shouldn't bios automatically detect the hard-drive? The drive in question is a Seagate Barracuda, 80gb with 7200 rpm.

The second one is an IBuyPower.com product, about 2-3 years old. When I returned home, the original hard-drive was completely fried. I purchased a new hard-drive for this, an 80 gb Seagate Barracuda, 7200 rpm, IDE/ATA (not knowing that this was in the other computer, I assure you). On copying the Windows XP installation files, I get tons of "File cannot be Found" errors, seemingly randomly popping up. It may be due to a bad CD/DVD ROM drive, but I am unsure what to do.

Thank you for any and all your help, have a good night.

Thank you so much for your prompt reply!

Firstly, I do know the old HP system can support 80 GB hard-drives, there was an 80 GB hard-drive installed previously that did work in the machine, but for system specifications, this is all I could pull out of Bios:

Installed Memory - 320 MB, In 0 - 64 MB, in 1, 128 MB, in 2 - 128 MB

Bios Ver 1.02

Pentium 3 450 MHz.

No info that I could find on ATA-IDE drive support.



For the second computer, the CD has no scratches and is brand new, but I read that the faster the drive, the worse it was for the installation, interesting that you are saying the opposite. I installed windows XP on the older computer long before it had its meltdown, and there were no problems such as this. But, I should perhaps install a different CD-ROM drive and try that.

Thanks for all your help!