Both hard drives not found?

[Labby11]

Hello all,
I purchased a new Western Digital 80 GiG hard drive. I installed it and put Windows XP and all my programs on it and it worked fine. I thought I would take my old (full of virus) Maxtor and format it. I pluged it in the the slave drive and right clicked and hit format. Now my computer (Dell 2400) will not sense any drives? I even tested the drives on other computers and they work fine. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Labby

[bigH2O]

Prolly would have been good if you had asked us this before you pluged the virus laden drive in, but you didn't... we would have said DON'T! A high level format does nothing to remove viruses, or any files for that matter. It just marks all the space as being unused so that the existing files can be overwritten. To get rid of existing files, you have to low level format the drive, and that isn't recommended on modern IDE drives because it can change the geometry of the drive and wipe out information about which sectors on the drive are bad.

Do you have any idea what viruses were on your old drive? There are some really nasty buggers out there that can just walk right over the bus to your new drive the minute you plug it in. If that's what happened, your gonna have some fun cleaning up after yourself.