Installing new hard drive, PLESE HELP

I recently bought a Seagate Pata/100 Barracuda 3.5 250 gig internal hard drive to install as my new (and only) hard drive on my Sony Vaio desktop. Ive taken out the old one and hooked up the new on exactly as the old one was. i also moved the jumper to the master location. the problem is when i try to install my windows xp from the backup recovery wizard disks i made, it doesnt work. i put in the startup disk and is starts to work then it gets to a blue screen and an error window pops up and says it cant find the drive. i tried using a universal ata driver but it still has the same effect. what am i doing wrong? Does anyone have an idea? im pretty new to computer hardware so im out of ideas. (also, i tried putting the old drive back in and the same error message pops up now too. if that makes a difference :/ help would be very, very appreciated. thanks in advance.

 

:wave Welcome to Major Geeks! :major
Go into the BIOS and make sure the drive is recognized. If it is, then the problem is likely with the recovery disks. If something goes slightly wrong during the creation of the recovery discs, it can really cause problems later. Since the original drive is also producing the error, I'd say the problem is with the recovery software. To be sure, visit the Seagate web site and download the diagnostic tool for the drive, they're usually bootable tools. So run the diagnostic; if the drive tests OK, then we know for sure the problem is with the recovery media. There's a small chance that the recovery software requires the drive to be formatted first (this is unlikely since most if not all recovery software has the option to create and format partitions), so try formatting it before running the recovery software. If the original drive still has a functional Windows on it, you can copy the entire drive image to the new one, and skip the whole recovery software thing. There's several free programs for mirroring one drive to another:
Digital Dolly http://www.majorgeeks.com/Digital_Dolly_d5183.html
EaseUs Disk Copy http://www.majorgeeks.com/EaseUs_Disk_Copy_d4845.html
HD Clone http://www.majorgeeks.com/HDClone_Free_Edition_d3809.html
Others can be found here http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html and you can find all kinds of other hard drive tools like diagnostics, formatting/partitioning tools, and what not, at this link http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html

Good luck!

[dlb]
:major

 

Thank you for the fast reply . I know this is a silly question but how do i get to the bios screen, and what should it look like? ive heard it can be done with the esc, f1 or delete key but these dont seem to work. I dont think (as of yet) that the recovery discs are faulty because ive used them once before successfully. My old drive was working fine until i took it out and tried to install the new one but i took special care to put everything back exactly how it was so i dont think its improperly hooked up either. Is there some specific third party driver i should try?

 

Sony Viao bios access should be F2 or F3. Most times you can see if the disk is properly recognized in the POST (Power On Self Test) screen on boot up (if there is no manufacturers Logo screen covering it).

If there is, once you're in the bios you can disable the logo screen.