I fitted a new 80gig hard drive but my cmos wont let me skip it as it is not formatted yet. Do i need a driver disk to format it before it will be recognised please? Ive had to disconnect it so i can get into windows and use the computer as normally. Sorry to be a pest but im just a novice at this type of thing
It sounds like the way you have your drives setup, it's attempting to boot to the new hard drive. Make sure you've set BIOS to boot off the drive Windows is on already. If that's not possible, you might want to make sure the drive Windows is on is on the Primary IDE (also IDE 1 or 0, depending on the motherboard's numbering scheme---use whichever is the lowest number).
Most new hard drives are factory set to 'Master'. If this new drive is to share the same IDE cable as your Windows hard drive, you will need to change the jumpers to slave