I would like to know why the following happened. I wiped a hard drive clean using Darik's Boot and Nuke to put win7 beta on the drive and test it. Win7 would not recognize the drive. After this I tried XP, same result. Then I tried w2k, 98SE with the same results, would not recognize the hard drive. I also tried 98SE bootdisk, no go. I Googled about the MBR, tried this information and still no go. The win CDs are full not upgrade versions.
I had downloaded Ubuntu 9.04, so I tried this. Guess what? You guessed it, Ubuntu recognized the
Drive, went on easy as pie and is quite usable (I am 66 and this is the first use of any linux OS).
Is Ubuntu that much more mature than windows or am I missing something?
Thanks

Hi,
My guess is that you installed a file system that Windows does not "see" when you cleaned the drive. Ext2 or ext3 would be my guess. I use multipe drives/OSs and Windows does not know of the existence of Linux on another drive.
Peace,
Clarke

After using Darik's Boot and Nuke the hdd was clean, even the MBR was cleaned. The first OS tried was Win7 RC, could not recognize the HDD, the next was XP-Pro then W2k-Pro, all the same. Next I tried 98SE boot disk and then tried to write the MBR to the HDD, all could not recognize the HDD. This is when I tried Ubuntu 9.4 and it went on slick as snot. Thus the only time anything wrote to the HDD was when Ubuntu was installed. What am I missing here?
Thanks crigby for your fast response, Ron

What kind of hard drive is it? SCSI/SATA drives usually won't install from XP or earlier without 3rd party drivers... not sure how Vista or Win7 handles them.

Thanks retsoksirhc for inquiring. The HDD is PATA Maxtor 80GB 100 and is running Ubuntu 9.4 quite well. When I say that Windows did not recognize the HDD, it says that there is no HDD found period. But Ubuntu 9.4 found the drive and loaded. The HDD was wiped clean including the MBR and multiple windows (98SE, W2K-Pro, XP-Pro, Win7-RC and 98SE bootdisk) could not find HDD.
Thanks, Ron.