Hard drive question

[a ounce a day]

All right, today i bought a new hard drive a 160 gb one. And i know all the stuff about master and slave because when i hooked up my cd rom drive and i know about the setup utility and stuff. But when i tried to hook up my second hard drive (first one was only 18 gb) I think i must have unplugged everything and took the hard drive out to see if it was hooked up on master and not slave or cable select. And i was sure that i hooked the new hard drive up right but it kept on saying no device in primary hard disk 0 or 1. So my question is, is it true that when u unplug your hard drive when the computer is off it deletes your hardrive completly?

Thanks

 

[Tommy Boy]

nooooo, you can unhook it. did you put the old hard drive back on the end connector of the ribbon cable? because the master drive likes to be the first one on the cable.

 

[catalyst1]

Also, many BIOSs auto-detect hardware and update accordingly. If you booted the computer without the drive, it might have removed it from its hardware list. Then what might have happened is when you booted with it plugged back in, the BIOS finished loading before the drive was spinning at full speed and ready to be recognized. The solution: boot the computer and restart without turning off. If restart isn't an option, just turn it off and back on as fast as you can so as to keep the hard drive spinning as fast as possible to make sure it is ready for when the BIOS scans the hardware again.

 

[a ounce a day]

yea i did put the hard drive on the drive 1 in my computer the ribbons are labeled so it tells me which one is which and ok the bios thing well i think that well i tried fiddling around with master and slave on the drives and i think that i eventually ran out of choices what to do so i might have left both drives unplugged n just ran the cd drives because at first it was recoginizing no drives. (i have a cd drive dvd drive 18 gb hard drive and 160 gb hard drive) O and another thing when u click F2 setup and you click on boot sequence should it say windows xp or should it just say cd drive or hard drive??