hey can someone please help me, i have two hard drives in my system, a maxtor 40 gig and a maxtor 120 gig. i was using my 40 gig hard drive as a backup for extra storage but just recently i rebooted my system and now my computer isnt detecting the hard drive, it appears in the BIOS so it dnt think its a faulty cable.. can anyone help me please? thx

Someone please reply asap because if no1 can help im gonna have to try installing windows on my spare hard drive and formatting my 120 gig hard drive, set it up again then format my spare hard drive.. it will take some time so if anyone can help ill b gratefull

UPDATE: i have just attempted to set windows up on spare hard drive by bootin from my xp disk, doesnt work im really stuck here. any help will be appreciated.

I've written 2 articles in the Computer Help Tutorials board in this forum that may help. There's links to those in my signature at the bottom of this message. If those don't help, then the advice that I gave to someone with a similar problem recently may assist you:

To boot your PC from the Windows 98 CDROM, I've assumed that your PC's BIOS is set to enable CDROM booting. Maybe it isn't. To check the setting, go into the BIOS Setup screen (which you normally do by pressing F2 or Delete within the first couple of seconds of switching on the PC - it should tell you on the screen) and look for the Boot Device Order or Priority. Make sure that the CDROM drive is listed before the hard disk.

If that doesn't work, you'll need to get the floppy drive working. It could be one of several faults:

1. Dead floppy drive (possible)
2. Dead ribbon cable (possible)
3. Ribbon cable loose or fitted incorrectly (likely)
4. Faulty motherboard (unlikely).

To check the ribbon cable:

a) Open the PC case (with it switched off obviously) and inspect the flat grey data cable that joins the floppy drive to the motherboard;
b) Confirm that the red stripe on one edge of the cable (which can be rather feint on old systems) is pointing towards the power connector on the floppy drive end and towards the centre of the motherboard on the motherboard connector end. If either of those sockets are labelled to indicate which pin is pin number 1, then that's a double-check - the red stripe should be on the pin 1 side.
c) Make sure the end of the cable with the slits in it is at the floppy drive end, not the motherboard end.
d) If it all looks OK, take the cable out of the PC, blow into the connectors to remove any dust (or wipe it off with a damp bit of kitchen towel if the dust has built up into thicker lumps) and then refit it securely, checking that you follow those rules described above. Don't blow all the dust around inside the PC!

Let us know how you get on

P.S. What version of Windows are you trying to install? Windows 98 can only see partitions up to 37.4Gb I think.