new member to the IT world too

[malcolm mogg]

At the tender age of fifty odd i decided to have alook into computers, having never touched one before its a very steep learning curve.I've been at it two months now, built a couple, out of old bits and pieces with reasonable success and strange results at times. However as finances are very limited i have to try to improve my pc and my skills at a very slow pace.
the problem i'm facing now is having purchased a maxto 80GB hdd i find the old gigabyte GA 7IX 1999 vintage motherboard wont recognise it either as a slave drive or primary, with jumpers or cable select. Also when connected slave or master the pc will not go past the setup and shows "primary disc fail" Remove it and she fires up into windows as normal.is it the m/board, maxtor or(most likely ) me, cheers.

[dcc]

Did you format and partition the hdd?

btw...being in my mid fifties I have also joined that exclusive club of Old Farts.

[DimaYasny]

if the MB can't recognize the HD, you should look into the manufacturer's website for a bios update. that might update the MB's bios to a newer version capable of working with hard disks up to ~132Gb

[malcolm mogg]

thanks for the replies, as soon as the hard drive is connected it wont let you any where near formatting or partitioning . since posting my question i have tried the new hdd in my fully functional PC and the same thing happens, that one has equal size drives ,so iguess its back to the supplier. Anyway thanks a bunch for the welcome folk great to know you're all out there