Not detecting IDE hard drives?

[EdenB]

First a little background, the hard drives in particular are both IDE, a Hitichi 160GB and a Samsung 80GB. I've been using both in my HP Computer, the Samsung coming with it.

I brought a new case, motherboard and processor and put them together with the RAM, graphics card and usb card of the HP PC, as well as the drives. After finally figuring out how it all fits together and what goes where (including the problem of a three pin connnector for two pins), it can't find the attached hard drives. I've tried using the IDE cable that came with the motherboard, the old IDE cable and left the jumper settings as was before, then tried a few combinations, but it can only detect the DVD ROM, apart from in some occasions detecting various characters (such as club, heart, spade, letter) as a hard drive, but not finding it bootable.

Has anyone any idea what could be the problem? The IDE cables are keyed, so they're in the right way.

[glc]

Motherboard model, please. We need system details to properly assist you.

[EdenB]

939Dual-SATA2.

It's now detected it (I had the jumpers set incorrectly) and restarts itself after the Windows loading sign. I've gone into safe mode and it appears to work in that, minus the usb mouse not working. I'll attempt to use a PS/2 on next load.

The motherboard driver CD is saying it can't load a thing also. And everything is running extremely slow.

[glc]

You have to do a repair reinstall of Windows after moving a hard drive from one machine to another. If it's a HP preload, you have to buy a new copy of XP, both for licensing reasons, and the fact that you can't do a reinstall on a generic motherboard with the HP recovery CD.

[EdenB]

How can I do a repair reinstall? I already have a Windows XP Home CD, from my previous computer, which isn't being used at the moment.

[Ghost(BOO!)]

ther should be an option for it when the disk boots

[glc]

http://forum.pcmech.com/showthread.php?t=151522