Wiped HDD are doa

I received several Maxtor 40 gb hard drives that were “wiped” by the donor. So far, I have not been able to get past “operating system not found” or “hard disk not found” on any of them. Using three different computers and trying all the variations that I know produced nothing. I don’t want to discard working parts if they can be recycled. XP gets through several screens and stops at “Setup is loading Windows” on the scroll bar. The screen reads “cannot continue press F3 to exit” which will reboot the machine and repeat the process. That indicates XP can’t find the HDD either, I think. What am I neglecting here? What do you suggest I try to successfully recycle these drives?

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Are you able to slave it to a pc and try to right click on the drive and select 'format?'

I think I remember on some older drives you will need to put on a new MBR on the first seek track of the drive. The heads will look for it and if it is not there then the drive will seem to be absent. A program called Ghost can do it for you if you slave the drive. It will write a new track. It's been so long since I have to do it I don't know if m advice is of any help??

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