I have an older Western Digital hd. The make is a wd600. It is 60gb, and 5400 rpm. I tried to make it a slave on my computer today. I did everything I was supposed to, but for some reason, when i hooked up both that hd, and my primary hd. Windows xp wouldn't load. I replaced the newer slave with the older 40gb i had, and windows booted fine. I know i had my jumper on the hd set currectly. Why doesn't this hd allow windows to load so i can format it? is there a way to format a drive without going to windows? I just want this new slave hd to work properly. can anyone help please?

Try instaling it as the master on the secondary IDE controller. Usually in place of the CD-ROM. See what happens. If not, make a DOS disk with the Western Digital software on it.

Make the HD the primaty master and unhook all other drives. Boot with the floppy and zero fill the drive that way. Then it should work as a slave no problem.

Why doesn't this hd allow windows to load

As long as WinXP still boots when only the master is attached on its own, there must be a hardware problem if adding a slave prevents the boot process from getting to the desktop.

Is the system just stalling at a black screen or are there any messages, beeps or other activity and what does the HDD LED do?

First check that you can see it in the BIOS setup (either slaved or as a lone master). You then need to juggle the jumpers, cables, connectors until you can see it in the BIOS. If you cant get it recognised in the BIOS then nothing else is likely to help.

that's what baffles me.......I CAN get it to recognize in the bios. It's tells me what kind of hd and everything. But when I try to go to windows after that, it stalls at a blank screen. I will try to hook it up as the master though as Classicsoftware said.......

It could be that the partition is set as "active". when you have partitioned it, try setting it as slave in the primary IDE connector.