Resolved HD initialize- Device not ready

I am installing a known good western Digital 40GB HD in a Dell 4600 and also have a small slave drive as well. When I boot up, it doesn't find a hard drive. I went to bios and made sure the hd was set a auto and it just says "unknown ". I used a usb adapter on my other desktop(HP) and it showed the hd as an unknown drive and it told me to initialize. When I selected that, it said "device not ready "
I even tried another hd I had with same results.
It may be that my other desktop is a Vista 64 bit and the Dell is a XP x86????
I don't care about saving anything on the hd, I just want to re-format it with the xp.

 

Yes, sorry, it is an IDE...I did set the 40g to master and the other to slave

 

Perhaps not relevant but some older drives have separate settings for Master and Master/Slave Present.

Check if that's the case or post the model and I'll see if I can get the specs online.

You say this is a known good drive, can you tell how you know this is the case?

 

model WD400BB-75JHCO
I don't think that is the case..but..maybe??
I took this one out of my sister's old system that was working..4 months ago. I tried to run a Hirens hd regenerator, but it couldn't find a hard drive(before I added the slave

 

So basically it was know to be working 4 months ago?

One other question I was going to ask (but I think you've just answered it ) was if you had tried to run the drive on it's own?

If your BIOS can't detect the drive and Hiren can't I would say the drive is trashed. You could try swapping out the data cable or using another power connector but I really don't think it'll help.

 

sorry that I didn't follow through...I did finally replace the ribbon cable and got it to work. Thanks for the replies and help