hey guys,

first up my comp is a dell xps gen4, 2gb ram,250gb sata hd, running xp home

i wanted to get another harddrive as my first was getting full up, so i bought a 300gb maxtor sata drive, plugged it in and set it up no problem, but when i rebooted it xp kept hangin so i disabled it and xp booted up fine, eventually i formatted the hd & reinstalled it (in safe mode) & when i rebooted i was all happy as everything was working good, that was until i went to play bf2 and got a message saying insert bf2 dvd, the dvd was in the drive but windows isnt showing the drive (in explorer or the hardware profiles)

the dvd drive works grand as the bios sees it & i can boot off it (i repaired windows to see if that would work) buty xo is having no luck with it

any ideas??

thanks in advance

Welcome to PCHF madrab

If you have been changing drives around, have you checked that the jumpers on the drive are set correctly: If the two Drives are on the same cable, then one should be Master one Slave. On some computers both need to be Cable Select

the hd's are sata and the dvd is ide, but i checked it anyway and the dvd is set to cable select & still no joy

do you have the correct onboard drivers for SATA? Is it a sata 150?

i think they are the correct drivers but i didnt install any, as they came with the machine

what I am guessing is that is it not intialized so somtimes windows does not like it somtimes. As you can see. Can you plug in the drive and boot into safe mode, and right click my computer then click on manage then go to disk management, click on the new hard drive. Now click intialize. You should be ok to format after that.