Have a loose 80gig here, and was wondering the easiest way to clear-it out - It only has one of those 40 pin plugs so guess the only real way is to stick it in my current PC as a slave drive - just wondered if there was even easier.

Either that, or get a USB to IDE bridge cable, or external enclosure. Maplin do one for about 20 quid.

It will be faster if you connect it to the mainboard though.

And free! Will have to open up the box of this PC I am on now. There's already a slave drive in there, so hopefully just a case of swapping temporarily.

Hehe, temporarily lol.

I've had a drive 'temporarily' hanging out of the side of the case for about 2 years lol.

I don't think I can run 3 drives in this thing at the same time though. The slave drive in there now is big enough for my needs.

OK - I decided it waa actually easier to just keep the tower with the loose HDD intact, and just plug in power, monitor, etc feeds into it.

Trouble is it kept coming up "error loading operating system" - and couldn't think what this means. Any ideas? It doesn't want to boot from a CD with a system disk in it either.

PC is an AMD X64 4200+ dual core, on an Asus board. The MOBO software comes up on startup and i can get into setup. Just no further toward booting up / installing XP again.

Has the BIOS seen the hdd?

If it's an athlon 64, I presume the board has SATA ports, so the IDE ones may be disabled, or possibly not set to boot from the ide controller.

Sounds to me its Jumper setting is set to Master?

Try removing the jumper next to the 40 pin connector?

But it is the master drive, i.e this is the drive it uses to boot up the system, or at least it did. I did see Maxtor 120gig in the bios, so I know it sees it. It also saw the 2 CD drives. What should the jumper setting be for the boot drive?

Sorry, I read it as a loose (spare?)80gig drive so presumed it wasnt the Master Boot? Usually you have a couple of options when selecting an IDE Master drive, you can just select it as Master or choose cable select and make sure the boot drive is connected to first plug (end of)on IDE cable.

Are the other drives using the IDE interface (40pin) or SATA? You could also disconnect (temporarily)any CDRM/DVD drives (if they are IDE)just in case they are conflicting with the 80 gig drive.

Weird if it is connected and registering in Bios and set to boot from CDROM but not allowing the XP disc to spin up? Might be quicker to invest in an external ide/usb device as said previous.

You can get a caddy cheap from ebuyer to turn a spare drive into a removable external drive.

site is kaput at the mo so I can't link to it.