I don't see how Vista could cause the HD's not to show in the bios, but strange that it does work with XP..

Have a look again in the bios after installing XP and see if both HD's are detected, and if they are, wich is master and wich is slave.

Looks like you're right. I got excited when the XP disc found the drive. The first re boot of the install I was back to the bios unable to find the drive XP shows the drive as disk 0 @ID 0 on bus 0 on atapi (mbr)
I don't find any mention of master slave in the bios settings.. I must be missing a step
Thanks again,
Don

Hey San Diego Silver!
My welcome to PC Helpforum!

Is the harddisk recognized in the BIOS of your computer?
Are you able to change anything to it using FDisk?

If you're not sure what the above means, just ask.

Blue

Unfortunatly i dont think fdisk will work with Vista. It didn't work properly since ME

You'll need a program called GDisk...same thing but for NTFS drives.

Did you have both drives jumped as "cable select"?

If so and you now have a single drive, jump it as "Master" and make sure it's at the end of your IDE cable.

Vista is a little weird about how it accesses the drives, you have to be very specific with it.

I merged both threads.