Trying to put a computer together for the grandkids, everything going ok until I try booting up. The processor is amd k6 from wayback when but I do have a western digital 40 gig hard drive with windows xp out of a nothere computer that was working very good from a friend of mine. When I try to boot the computer the windows xp logo and everything seems ok but then it stops and wont go any more. All I want to do is format the drive and put windows 98 on it, that the processor and main board can handle. Any ideas on how I can get to format this drive. One more thing, I run a diagnostic western digital program from a floppy and it is saying I do not have a western digital drive in the computer I am sure I do I take it out and inspect it carfully and it is a western digital. The drive is only about 7 month old.

Presuming you want to scrub everything on the HDD - grab yourself a boot diskette and boot to it - then fdisk, format and install Win98. Post back if you don't know how to do any of these things.

You might want to download a fresh copy of the Western Digital diagnostic utilities and tools to check the drive again. If it still doesn't register the drive as WD, I would contact them and see what to do. It suggests that something may be wrong with the drive....