Hi, everyone!

Although I see a lot of responses for HD's for XP, I have a system running WinME. (Yeah, I know, I know... will upgrade to Vista soon on this computer. LOL)

Problem: Using IDE cord from CD-Rom to attach 2nd HD. BIOS recognized but invisible to windows?! I know this type setup is probably not conventional but shouldn't I still see the HD just as winMe recognized the CD-Rom previously?

Compaq Deskpro
Pent III
550 MHz
192MB Ram
OS - WinME

Please advise! Thanks, Don Jay

Your current computer just won't cut for Vista. You'll pretty much need a new PC, if you want to make full use of what Vista has to offer. . Stick with XP or even 2000 for now.

If you have only 1 hard drive and 1 cd-drive, then instead of sacrificing your CD-ROM, set the 2nd hard drive as slave (to learn how, Google is your friend) and connect it to the unused connector on the Primary IDE cable. This will be the cable that connects to your first hard drive. Then you will still have use of the CD-ROM. The IDE interface will allow you to connect up to 4 devices (i.e. 2 hard drives and 2 cd-roms, or 3 hard drives and 1 cd-rom, etc.)

If this is a brand new hard drive, then it will need to be formatted before Windows can recognize it as a HDD. I'm not familiar with WinME for formatting, so again Google for the steps:)

You might want to check in disk management. It can be found in control panel/administrative tools/computer management (might be different in ME). From there you can see all the connected drives and if you see it from there, you can run some diagnostics on it to see what may be the issue.

Vista requires a processor running at least 1 Ghz. And a minimum of 512M of RAM. So instead of putting any money into that dinosaur, get a new PC.