Problems after installing new hard drive

Are you absolutely sure your MSI K8N mobo uses the nForce 4 Ultra chipset? Hmm.. looks like all the chipset drivers for the nForce 4 chipset using the same ones anyways. I am wondering if your HDD is not configured properly or there is a compatibility issue of some sort going on with that new HDD you installed. Do you have another spare disk you can install windows and the mobo drivers and see how that goes? Jumper settings are correct and that your Sata port you have it plugged into supports the new Sata drive SATA 3Gb/s?
 
If your MSI board does not support SATA 3.0 gb/s data transfer speed then configure the HDD jumpers and short pins 5-6. This will have the drive configured to 1.5 gb/s data transfer speed
 
Well I finally got the system up and running the way its suppose to. Thanks for everyone's help!

After trying a few times to get the downloaded drivers to load I went looking for the setup disk that came with my motherboard. After a searching through a couple of boxes, I found it (I've moved a couple of times since I built this machine, and I didn't do the packing). Once I had the setup disk I was able to get all the drivers installed and then on MSI's site I was able to use their live function to automatically load the latest drivers. Not sure why I couldn't load them from the downloads originally.

Just before this posting I installed the jumper on the HD as recommended in a previous post. Not sure there is a difference that I've noticed.

A couple questions I have:
- why can't I get the new hard drive to show up as the primary drive in the Bios (its the second or third behind an open primary and my two DVD drives which are second and third slaves- I know I am mixing up the terms. Just can't remember them right now and don't want to reboot to the bios settings.)
- why does the computer start up so slowly? The windows logo on the black screen is on for quite a while before it finishes loading. Is this related to the issue above?
- why does this new hard drive show up in the "safely remove hardware" green arrow icon in the lower left of the task bar? The DVD drives don't, nor did my old hard drive.


Beyond this I need to start working at trying to recover my data off my old hard disk. I put the old drive in an external enclosure and plugged it into the computer. It doesn't load up and seems to cause some functions to freeze. For example I can't shut down the computer with the old drive plugged in. Is this because the old drive was "C" and the new drive is "C"? If so, how to change the old?

Per someone else's recommendation I downloaded Knoppix CD and was able to use that to see the contents of the old drive which gives me hope. I just haven't figured out how to move the info from the old drive to the new within the that OS. (Pretty cool OS by the way. fast). As someone pointed out above I am a noob at this stuff so I wouldn't even know the first thing about trying to fix whatever is preventing the old drive from working in XP. At this point I would be satisfied if I could recover my data and then throw out the old drive.

When playing around in that OS I tried to access files on my old drive but it seemed to lock up (the window went gray).

Another thought- if the hard drive does still have all the data there must be some type of software/OS issue? My wife was downloading some new fonts the night before the computer went out. Could she have downloaded and installed something that did this?

Once again thanks for your help. If you're able to help with my remaining issues I would appreciate it.
 
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