Not recognizing hard drive

[groxby]

Hi,
I found a PC by the side of the road that was only missing the hard drive, so I thought I'd try to fix it up. I bought a decent HD from a reputable seller on eBay, and connected it properly, and tried to boot up the PC with the Windows XP disk in the CD ROM drive.

However, I got to the blue install windows XP screen, and pressed enter, only to have my computer tell me that it couldn't find any hard drive on my computer. I switched the power cables and the IDE cables and verified that they were in fact working. So why can't my computer recognize my hard drive. Is there something obvious that I am missing or should I try to return the hard drive?

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Gabe

[AMDfan]

Hi,
I found a PC by the side of the road that was only missing the hard drive, so I thought I'd try to fix it up. I bought a decent HD from a reputable seller on eBay, and connected it properly, and tried to boot up the PC with the Windows XP disk in the CD ROM drive.

However, I got to the blue install windows XP screen, and pressed enter, only to have my computer tell me that it couldn't find any hard drive on my computer. I switched the power cables and the IDE cables and verified that they were in fact working. So why can't my computer recognize my hard drive. Is there something obvious that I am missing or should I try to return the hard drive?

Any ideas?
Thanks,
Gabe

When you go into the BIOS, can you see the hard drive? If so, then the computer is seeing it. I assume the drive is already formatted?

[cguan_77]

Hi groxby, amdfan is right check your CMOS if the your HDD is detected if it isn't then it could be a hardware problem..if it is detected then try to reinstall OS..