HDD auto detection

[Biggles]

Have accuierd a couple of Hard drives that I will use on a mates computer but am having problems detecting them on my own PC.
After connecting them up to my own PC I try auto detect in the bios and it comes up with nothing.
plugged my own HDD back in and still nothing on auto detect but the system boots perfectly.
So I plug one of the other discs in and forget that BIOS cant see it, stuff in a Win 98 startup diskett in hoping that Fdisk will find the bloody thing but oh no "cant find a hard drive"
The computer I'm trying to test these drives on is a reliable home build from a couple of years ago with an EPOX mobo.

Anybody out there got any ideas why my puter cant see any of these two drives or even my own drive come to that?

 

[Biggles]

Sorry meant to add the two drives are a 20Gb and a 40GB.

 

[Demalii]

check the jumpers on the back of the hdd's i've had my computer not detect them before, same with cd-rom's.. but i was using winME lol

 

[Apokalipse]

yeh make sure they are not both set to master or slave, if the jumper settings are right, try one hard drive at a time to see if it detects them

 

[Biggles]

we are getting somewhere. I got one of the 40gb drives formatted OK and it is working as a storage device on my XP system. The puzzuling thing is theat the BIOS cant see either of these drives. To me this looks like a mobo problem espescially as I tried to flash the BIO and it aint having it.

 

[Biggles]

BIOS cant even see the hard drive that this system is now running

 

[Apokalipse]

maybe try a different IDE cable