Hi I had a western ditital hard drive for a year or so and all of a sudden it would let me open up the user and get to desk top but when I tried to access anything it would say that I would need to get to the administrator which I was and would not let me access anything so I tried to restart same ole. So I bought a new hard drive seagate and installed my XP cd and set it all up and then installed my old western digital hard drive as a slave I scanned it totally and I was able to access my stuff from the slave but a month or so later my daughter was on a public libraray siteand it froze up so I tried to restart the computer and it would not let me it said it was unable to find the hard drive or check wiring and it did the same thing when I tried to reboot the XP with and with out the slave and got the same results. Thanks really need help.

During power-up, enter hardware setup (typically F2 on most PC's). Does setup see the hard disk? If no, then the hard disk may have died if nothing else was changed relating to hardware. If setup recognizes the hard disk, reload the XP operating system from the CD.

Also when starting up, look at the screen for options, such as F2 or some key to enter the BIOS (could be - Del, F12, F11, Esc keys)
Have to check screen to see what will enter system setup or BIOS

There you will be able to see if the machine sees the hard drive

Hi Bone252100, I tried that and it still did not see the hard drive. I called seagate and they said that I could download there DOS and check it to see what is wrong they said most returned drive people thought were bad were not. Is it bad or am I just spinning my wheels.

Seahwk83 I have done that and the same results happened !

The fact remains the system does not "see" the hard disk. The primary causes are:

Inproperly strapped disk (the option straps should be set as Master or Cable Select). This is probably not the cause since the failure occurred during operation.

Poor power or data cable connection. This is worth checking since the cabling has been disturbed. Check the connections at the hard disk & at the other end.

Bad hard disk!