Do I have a bios virus on my PC . . ? Clearly, something nasty was inadvertently downloaded and run resulting in the WinXP-Pro start menu not wanting to appear and everything slowing down. Clever me thought no problem, I need to reload WinXP anyway so proceeded to do a C: drive format (via a DOS floppy) with a view to reloading WinXP-Pro. I should add at this point that I'm running an Intel motherboard with a pair of IDE hard-drives in raid (striped) mode. First problem that I noticed was when running the raid utility (accessed during boot-up) the drives were listed but not accessible to make any changes. Anyway, not being deterred by this I then proceeded to reload windows. This went through the usual motions and then reached a point where it came up with a message saying that it was unable to identify any hard-drives! Ah, I thought, MBR corrupted, lets try another pair of drives, this time they are SATA drives via a PCI raid card. Initial boot goes OK and into the new raid utility. Drives configured OK, partition formatted, everything seems OK. Now let's try loading WinXP onto the new drives. But, oh dear, same problem, drives not recognised . . ! ! Help!

Welcome to PCHF, did you delete the partition when you re-installed Windows or did you just re-format the drive?

Not absolutely sure, may have just formatted. I guess from your question that makes a difference?

Heh, just gathering the info Give THIS a go and let's see if your hunch is correct before we do anything more drastic...

Many thanks for the advice. I know it's a dumb question . . . but do I install DOS and then this application onto the drive(s)?

Sorry, wrong link. Try again, I have updated the link now.

OK thanks, but what do I do next? I guess I need to install and run the DOS version - having booted the PC with DOS from a floppy to start with? Can I run the application from a CD (if I put it on that first)? The PC will boot to a CD but how do I get DOS to recognise the CD drive just to run the application? Or have I completely got the wrong end of the stick?
:o