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Hard drive problem

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I have just brought a new hard drive IDE for my PC, and a legal copy of vista, I have put the drive in and can find it in the bios.
When i try and load windows it cant find a drive to put vista, i have tried to format the drive, but not getting anywhere, i have tried to FDISK but it says it is not recognised as a command.
When i have tried to format it it asked for the current volume Label for drive c, i found the la be but when i enter this is comes up and say its the incorrect one.
any help or ideas please.
The PC has all the requirements for Vista, and i feel the hard drive is not showing, i maybe wrong but lost now as to what to do next.
thanks

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ringo711 said:
I have just brought a new hard drive IDE for my PC, and a legal copy of vista, I have put the drive in and can find it in the bios.
When i try and load windows it cant find a drive to put vista, i have tried to format the drive, but not getting anywhere, i have tried to FDISK but it says it is not recognised as a command.
When i have tried to format it it asked for the current volume Label for drive c, i found the la be but when i enter this is comes up and say its the incorrect one.
any help or ideas please.
The PC has all the requirements for Vista, and i feel the hard drive is not showing, i maybe wrong but lost now as to what to do next.
thanks

Just want to add its like Vista cant find the drive
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I understand that the hard drive shows in the BIOS, but what I meant with using the Windows XP CD was to see if the hard drive shows up in another version of Windows.

Since you don't have one, do you have the old hard drive, and is it still working? If you do and it is, you could try putting the new hard drive as a slave and see if it shows up in disk management, assuming Windows is installed on the old hard drive...

Seems like a longshot, since Vista should have support for legacy drivers, but have tried downloading the drivers for your IDE controller to a flash drive or burning them to a CD and the load the drivers in the hard disk setup in Vista?

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Storage Expert

Since this is an IDE drive, have you set its jumpers correctly?

It seems you are saying this is the only HDD in your system. So ideally it should have a 4-pin Molex power connector from the PSU plugged into its back edge, plus a wide 40-pin connector on the end of a ribbon cable plugged in. It should be the END (Black) connector of that cable into the HDD; the Blue connector on the other end goes to the mobo port. And that should be the FIRST IDE port (IDE0) if your mobo has two. Then check the label on the HDD for how to set a jumper on pins between the power and data connectors. Set it to be the Master. (This is important - any IDE port MUST have a Master device.) I am assuming there is no other IDE device, so the middle (Grey) connector will not be plugged into anything.

Boot into BIOS Setup and check that the IDE port is Enabled and the HDD detected with the right size. You indicate that it is seen there. If you have NO SATA devices, you might consider Disabling the SATA ports for now.

Some of your story is puzzling, so let's clear that up before proceeding. You say you tried running FDISK, and you tried to Format the new drive. How? If you do not have a working hard drive with an OS in the system, did you boot from a floppy disk with an older DOS on it? By the way, when you Format a disk and it asks "Volume Label:" it is NOT asking you to enter some special label you have to find. Every disk has a Volume Label and usually you enter whatever you like (up to 11 characters), like "RingoDisk"; if you don't, it will assign its own "name" as a mixture of characters.

If you are trying to Install Vista from an optical disk, you do NOT need to Partition or Format that HDD before starting. The Install Disk will do those steps for you.

Which brings up the optical drive. Where is it? That is, is it another IDE device on the same IDE port / cable, or on another IDE port? Or, is it a SATA device?

Either way you will place the Vista Install disk in the optical drive. You boot into BIOS Setup and look for where you set the Boot Priority Sequence. Set it to use the optical drive first, and your new HDD second, and nothing else. Save and Exit (usually the F10 key) to save the setting and reboot. It should boot from the Install disk in the optical drive and find the HDD as an empty drive unit it can use. Does that work? If yes, you probably can proceed with your installation.

Let us know what happens.

Thanks for your help, I think i have done it now, i did check all the things you have said, and was thinking ot would work like Xp, however I decided to reload XP on the drive it went on with no problem, so once i done that i tried vista, it would not ungrade, but loaded a clean full version on, and as far as i can see it's running fine.

Thanks to everybody who took the time to offer help, it was usful
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