I ran the windows boot disc and in the disk manager part i formatted the partitions to make one unpartitioned space (as before) only this time AFTER id merged the partitions into one unalloated it said windows cannot make a partition on this disk.
I went back to my bios and now I cant see my hdd in there! I didnt change any settings and nothing is set to raid. I ran g-parted and dban autonuke to try and format the drive completley outside of windows but those programs cant see it. Seems only windows 7 can. XP install cant see it either.
any ideas? =[
SOLVED:
After trying my hdd in every sata slot I almost gave up. then for some reason I decided to remove the cables o the dvdrom drive and start up. thats it! I could see the hard drive in the bios! I then turned off, reconnected the disk drive and everything was cool.
I dont know what the problem was or why what i did solved it. Mr mod ca either delete this now or if someone cares to explain what they think happened maybe it could help someone else googling a similiar thing.
Edited by liiam, 30 January 2011 - 07:47 AM.