Im really in need of help here guys....this is the wierdest thing ive seen. ok so i have a dell dimension 3000 (woopty doo) and its always treated me well and done what i needed (cept graphix cause of the lacking of pci xpress or agp but anyway). so today i was fed up all the clutter and decided it was time for a reinstall!...SOOO usually i use the little auto reinstall that comes with the dell machine you just pres ctrl and f11 at the bios screen and it automatically reinstalls windows in like 5 mins...handy feature right??...well sadly a while back the original hard drive crashed and the nice feature was gone, so i got a replace ment cause i was still under warranty at the time. well the new drive shows up... a freakin WD hard drive (this is all ata btw folks) and by the looks of it a refurb. and i come to find out that there was still the same type of sytem reinstall program but it took MUCH longer and installed a bunch of extra crap i didnt want. well ive done that twice already with this crappy hard drive of mine....SOOO i decided this time im just goanna format the drive with my xp install disk that includes service pack 2 and is LEGAL FROM DELL (seriously its real) but heres the wierd part...after i formatted it my computer wont see the drive. when i turn on the comuter all it sees is my cd/dvd drive but when i boot nto osx (on another drive on the same comp) or pop in the reinstall disk itll recogzie it. osx sees it all the time, but the re install disk only sees it when the drive hasnt been formatted.....can someone PLEASE FREAKIN HELP. lol sadly i need my windows back and dont have the $$ for a new hd. besides i really dont think that the drive is bad because i can transfer info on and off it while in osx.........if ANYONE has any ideas....please feel free to call me a moron and show me how to fix it .


Thanks,
Mac

does it recognize the OS X HD?
if so try switching the plugs
also are they jumpered if they are use 2 seperate cables to connect them

well heres the thing. osx and xp are on 2 seperate hard drives. but i completely removed the osx drive as a safety precaution before trying to format the xp drive and i re assigne the xp drive as master....i dont get whats wrong....

try plugging in the HD in the ATA port on the mobo that the OS X HD used

Is your HDD a SATA Harddisk??? If yes then you will need to give XP the SATA Driver Floppy, by pressing F6, when it asks you for 3rd Party RAID Drivers. It come right after Press F2 for ASR

never needed that for my SATA on XP or vista

also he said it was ATA

"this is all ata btw folks"

Reading skillz +2 lol




tried that already there on the same ribbon cable. osx is usually on the end master slot and xp is usually slave i tried all that moving and swapping already......next idea?? (i hope)

for some reason vista liked my HD to be 1st in the boot order so set it 1st and hit F12 or something to bring up a boot menu and select CD/DVD

another thing is to get a new ribbon cable

Not sure about Vista, but it is almost a must installing XP in the 1st HD (it must be seen as first by the BIOS, SATA Port 0 in my case).

vista too

i got it figured out guys thanks! it turns out it was as simple as a jumper setting. but the wierd thing was....i had NEVER used that setting before with this hd......and the pins i used.......werent marked. there was a cable select,master,and slave then there were 2 unmarked sets...i used the next one over and then everything worked to i tried setting it to slave like it used to be after that...and BOOM it works. thanks for all the suggestions tho guys .

lol my next suggestion was going to be cable selec5t because thats what my 2400 shipped on