trouble installing HD

I have a P3 733mzh with 256 RAM and a 10 Gb HD. I bought an 80 GB western digital HD. I hooked it up to my mother board(with no jumpers or controller card) and plug it in to the psu, booted up my pc then installed the software and created a boot disk for the HD. I try and partiotion the drive using the software provided wid the HD and an error apears. I press ok then try and do it agian and it says program in progress press ok to cont. or cancle to exit. the instuctions also say that afetr i installed the HD the pc should have automatically sense it and it should say new hadr ware detected, but it didn't. It said that if i didn't detect the drive reboot so i did that and when i did it booted up into the western digital winow inside of dos. when I put my os disk in, it will not reconize it.

Help what am i doing wrong?

I tried unpluging my other HD and just install the 80GB HD by it's self. The WD program formatted and partitioned the drive. it said reboot and insert Os disc. rebooted and put in Win ME OS and it said that it didn't reguinize it and to insert OS disc and press any key. I tryed it with 2 other OS CD and it wouldn't work. when i boot up it also say that the bios are not installed i'm thinking this is the problem but i don't know were to get the proper bios for my pc.

Thanks

was this computer working before you started this?
you probably need to repartition and reformat the HD before you try to install the OS you can do this with a boot floppy from ME or win98. If you don't know how, just ask,

luck,
robert

It was working great before. The new HD does not reconize any boot disc except its own. I can't repartiton it throught dos becuase i haven't got winMe to reconize that HD is there yet. When i first parttioned and formatted it the rebooted it just said no OS found please insert OS and press any key.

Ok if you don't have a boot floppy, make one from ME or download one from bootdisk.com.
You will need to turn off the machine, I would unplug your good HD and plug in the new one as master. Put in the floppy disk and restart machine. when you get to the a: prompt, type "fdisk" ( no quotes).
choose delete partition then choose create partition, then choose make primary dos partition then exit and reboot to the a: again.
type "format c:" (no quotes and a space between format and c
run the format, it may take some time.
reboot to the floppy again. switch to your cdrom drive and install your os from there.

hope this helps,
robert

i have a boot disk for 95-ME but it won't even reconize the boot disk. I can't get into promp. after booting up it goes striaght to the western Digital software already on the HD.after u do all the stuff it tells u too like partitioning and fornmating it says reboot and insert OS disc. So i do that and it just says No OS, please insert OS. I dunno whats wrong with it. thanks tho

thanks robert
My boot disk was messed up, i just remade one and it worked perfectly, but u gave me the idea i might have a bad disk so thanks alot u saved me from major headache

glad you got it working.
luck,
robert

After reading your problem (and dealing with one myself) I'm not sure I trust the Western Digital formatting program that comes with their drives. I used it on one of my previous drives and it seemed to really screw things up for me. I was running Windows XP and after using the WD utility and then booting to windows my computer would try to add the new drive and then it would freeze and give me a BSOD right at the end of the add new hardware wizard. Eventually (with some help from these forums) I found out that I had to go into my registry, remove any instances of this particular drive, and then reformat it using a standard utility like robertadams suggested you do.

Anyone else ever have any problems using the WD format utility?