Date: 03/02/07 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with a new-ish PC with a 2GHz processor and two 80+ gigabyte hard drives. The two hard drives appear to be dead. I switch them as master and slave, I plug in a working hard drive and try to find the other, to no avail. I thought the computer wasn't recognizing the drives but the Windows XP installation found at least one drive. At first it failed on trying to format the drive. On a second try (I think it was the second drive, too) it successfully formatted the drive (or it thought so, anyway) but halted and stated it was unable to create C:\Windows.

The motherboard recognizes and successfully operates the CD-R drive, the DVD-R drive, and freely boots an old (working) Windows 98 hard drive. When the working hard drive is installed, My Computer has no entry for the other hard drive.

What does this sound like? It seems weird that both drives would die at once when they're far newer and larger than the old drive I'm using in this computer. Are there any diagnostic recourses I have with these drives?

The bootup sequence also states "UltraBIOS is not installed because there are no drives installed." I have no idea what an UltraBIOS is or why it depends on a drive. It says this even when the working drive is installed.

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/753211.html