Wiping a computer hard drive?

Right i have two hard drive (Same make both compatable with the computer). I put the slave cable into my motherboard and plug both hard drives into the slave cable and put the power cable into the hard drives(thier internal hard drives).
The hard drive work on thier own but when i plug both hard drives in at the same time it wont work so what should i do?(I have the windows xp cd)when i try to format one hard drive( have tried with both hard drives)
it says "windows can not format this hard drive. Quit any disk utilites and prgrams that are using the drive............
Have tried this many times but this always happens so what should i do?
Thankshttp://goo.gl/pbCpki

 

Welcome to Major Geeks

From your post I can ascertain you are running Windows XP, and you have PATA drives. What exactly is not working? You are unable to format the non-OS drive? You said you tried to format BOTH drives . . . if you try to format the hard drive the OS is on, you will get such an error message, or erase XP if it is successful. ARE you trying to erase both drives, to prepare for loading an operating system? Seems that may be what you are trying to do . . .

A little more info on what you are trying to do would be helpful. Also information on your computer:

--Is this a commercial PC (Dell, HP, etc). If so, what model?

--If a home built PC, what is the make and model of the motherboard?

 

Also, since you're using a Master/Slave configuration, do you have the Master/Slave jumper blocks set correctly for both drives? One (the System drive) needs to be set as Master and needs to be connected closest to the mobo on the cable. The other needs to be set as Slave and connected to the other, farther connection on the cable.