Well I'm building a computer for my girlfriend who won't need to do anything more then listen to music while mapquesting or typing up a paper so it's not anything special it's literally what I had lying around the house from previous machines/upgrades. The 20 GB ATA hardrive I'm trying to put in it is giving me a serious headache! It was the primary master in the old computer it was in and even when I switch the pins on the hardrive it always comes up as the primary master on all my other comps! They are all SATA, is that the problem? I just want to reformat it and when I start it up and go into the BIOS to switch boot devices and make my hardrive the 1st boot it still boots off of the old hardrive (Which has a broken copy of Win95 and will not start, by the way). So it will not boot off of ANYTHING (Including CDROM, floppy, etc) except the hardrive when it is connected to the computer. All my comps run SATA hardrives but are ATA compatible, any suggestions? Thanks.

I am not sure what your problem is exactly. Are you trying to make this hard drive the primary on this new system? What exactly are you trying to do?

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Ubuntu 8.10

It sounds like, whenever this hard drive is connected, it somehow makes itself the primary boot device. He wants to make it secondary so he can format it.

So, does it let you get to you BIOS? What does it say there?

If thats the case just use your copy of windows to format it or if you dont have one just download a linux live cd and do it that way.

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Ubuntu 8.10

Yes I would love to but as I said when it is connected it is ALWAYS the primary boot device no matter what I tell it to do...I'll say boot from CDROM with my XP disk in it and it will boot from th HD and I don't understand why.