Hi again,
Thanks for responding Rick.

Buzzing huh? Have you checked for bee's ? *whacky grin*
LOL

You said that you reconnected the original drive and it boots fine,
however with the 2nd drive nothing happens. If the BIOS doesn't
recognize any of the drives then something nutty is going on. If it
only doesn't recognize the 2nd drive, then the drive is either bad,
your BIOS is old and doesn't support that size drive yet, or you bios
is messed up. I'd lean more towards the drive being screwed up or the
BIOS not being able to support it. If you know what brand and model
your BIOS is, you can upgrade it with a software download.

Well I, have used a 10GB HDD on this system, as a primary slave, at an
earlier time, and the BIOS and the OS both were showing it's presence.

After you figure that out I would disconnect the original drive and
[only] connect the 2nd drive on the primary IDE cable. Make sure that
when you do this you change the jumpers on the drive so that it is now
the MASTER. Depending on your bios you might have to enter setup and
reconfigure it so that it recognizes the new drive. Once thats in
place boot with a floppy disk and try switching to that drive. If that
works run fdisk, create a partition, and format it.

Did this and now the BIOS shows the precense of the HDD, but the sys
has to be booted with a bootable floppy. Now I, get a message
"Primary IDE channel no 80 conductor cable installed", though the
system continues to boot.Windows cannot be loaded and in Dos the hard
disk is not accessible. Fdisk does not show the presence of any
partitions.

If this doesn't work I would try one of the utilities listed on this
site - http://www.disk-utility.com/hard-dis...el-format.html

I've d/loaded HDD diagnostic utility - FJDT - from the above link and
followed the instructions. The Quick Test could not be completed as an
error message was generated "Error code : A101D6". I used Google but
could not get any result for the error message.

.... but if it didn't work, you can always used it as a cheap door
stop or a paper weight.

If I'm not able to solve the problem within a fortnight that how I'm
gonna use it.