First, make sure that the hard drive is attached to the motherboard, and that the motherboard recognizes it. You can do this in your PC Setup program, but the options in this program vary from BIOS to BIOS, so I can’t tell you exactly how.

Enter PC Setup by pressing a particular key before Windows loads; a message telling you which key to press appear soon after you turn the system on. Search PC Setup’s menus

To find listings for hard drives, and then make sure that your drive is in the program boot sequence. You may have to tell BIOS to search for hard drives (it should do so automatically).

If PC Setup can’t recognize the drive, try reopening your computer, checking all of the connections on the motherboard and hard drive, and rebooting again.

Here’s another possibility: Your power supply may be inadequate for the new motherboard. Peruse your motherboard’s documentation to find the wattage the vendor recommends.

If the hardware checks out, boot your machine from a floppy to see whether all the necessary files are accessible on your hard drive. If it uses the FAT 32 file format, any bootable floppy disk will do. If it uses the NTFS format, go 9on another system) to download NTFS.com’s free NTFS Boot Disk Utility, which will prepare a bootable floppy that can read NTFS hard drives.