First time;

I rebuild recycled computers for families who can not afford them. My problem is some computers, when I get them home do not reconize the hard drive. Most of the time I have the disk to the computers That is OS. But on four computers it says cannot find hard drive. They do work in the peoples home, first thing I check.

What I do in peoples homes because of personal info on thier computers is hook up thier HDs to my comp. with an external box I carry, I run a shredder on it then go to manager, it shows up as drive F then I run a format F on it. Doing this for nothing, I can not afford another hard drive to put in. Any suggestion.


Mike

Are you making sure the Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers are properly set?
Are you ensuring the drives are positioned on the cable correctly - that is, with the master drive on the master connector, and the slave, if present, on the slave?

Thank you for responding;

I only take out the hard drive and then put it back the same as I took it out no chance for mistake. I use a marker to mark it.

Mike

Aren't you connecting old drives to a different motherboard?

Tell us about your motherboard, and the drives you are trying see.

Hi.
No. I go to someones house who wants to donate thier computer to children that don't have computers. I sit there in thier house and do this. Same hard drive same computer. After I'm done it can not find the hard drive. I have three computers with same problem.
Thank you Mike

Ah, okay, I think. Let me get this straight so I don't send you off in the wrong direction - I feel I am confused by the order of events.

You said (in a slightly different order and my bold for emphasis)

That's great. There are lots out there. Of course, remember you are dealing with used, old technology parts that people want to get rid of. Not sure what you mean here. No OS is not the same thing as no hard drive. Are we missing hard drives or operating systems?

If Windows is running on a machine, there MUST be an original, legitimate Microsoft Windows "license" (usually a CD) for that machine. One license per installed OS per machine, no more, no less.

So this is your laptop? So you have 2 computers (a laptop and a PC?) and the drives are recognized in the enclosure with the laptop but not when you attach it to your PC? Tell us about your laptop and what version of Windows is running on it.

How? FAT32? NTFS?

What, exactly, does not recognize the drive?

When you check to make sure the computer works - what do you check for?

Again, I ask that you tell us about your motherboard (the one that does not work) the bad drives.

Did you look in the BIOS Setup Menu to see if they are seen by the BIOS?

Thank you, I think you just answered my question. My laptop is 2 years old. It runs XP. The systems I normally get in are 2000SE. When I hook up the HD to my laptop it would run NTFS which, from what I have read, is not recognized by 2000SE. ( I think ) The four computers Pen III with 40 to 80 G. Are worth fixing up for children to learn on. Is there any way to fix them ( the HD ) or am I wasting my time? As far as the motherboard, I don't know how to tell. I have never replaced one. If the proccesor is bad I part it out and store the parts for other computers, like DVD, CD, ethernet cards etc. As far as the software, some people do not have them. For some reason they throw them out.

Footnote:

I do this out of my home, I do not recieve any money for this. I am self taught from reading sites on my problems. This is the only site I became a member of because of what I have read. And I don't make myself clear sometimes. Sorry.

Do you mean Windows 98SE? That does not support NTFS, but instead does support FAT32. There is no Windows 2000 SE. Just Windows 2000 (also called Win2K) - and Win2K, like all NT based OSs, does support NTFS.

DOS based Windows (3.x, 95, 98, 98SE, and ME) do not supprt NTFS and cannot read NTFS drives
NT based Windows (XP, NT, Win2K, Vista) support both NTFS and FAT32.

So the solution, assuming the drives are still mechanically functional, is to connect the drives to an XP machine and format the drive using the appropriate file system for the machines they will go in. FAT32 for older versions of Windows, NTFS for NT/XP and later versions of WIndows.

Not a problem. When you don't know exactly what is wrong, it is hard to describe the problem. Just remember, the stupid question is the one not asked. And also, remember that Google is your friend. And since you are dealing with older systems, you might want to enter:

LBA support

into Google too.