I assume you have swapped the various 'new' drives around and made sure that
if it could be made to show up in Windows, that it was working fine.
Otherwise, I'd run scandisk or Norton Disk Doctor or some sort of surface
test to make sure it is working ok. A bad disk will show up in CMOS even if
it is damaged enough not to function properly within Windoze.
Other than that, the other advice has been good here: Make sure IDE 1
(secondary IDE, primary IDE should be labeled as 0) is activated. Make sure
that a HD is the Master on each channel, and any CDROMs or CDRWs are Slaves
to any HD's on their channel. Make sure the Master devices are jumpered as
Masters and the Slaves are jumpered as Slaves. I know someone said they had
CS mode working, but I've been tinkering with and building computers since
the 80s (can you say Heath kit? or TRS-80 or TI-99?) and CS has NEVER worked
properly for me in a PC. And also certainly, you'll need to do a reformat if
you are using NTFS formatted drives in anything less than an NT system. NT,
don't forget, encompasses everything from before NT-WS4.0 to the current
XP(NT5.1). There may also be an issue with these drives being FAT16 (since
4.3g HDs are years OLD by their very nature) and your system possibly being
FAT32. When Windoze95 died and Windoze98 appeared, so did FAT32. If these
drives were FAT16, they should still show up and work, but I wouldn't mix
and match FAT16 and FAT32 drives within the same system. You're asking for
trouble if you do IMHO (filenames longer than 8.3 can then become an issue).
What FAT type does FDISK show when you run it on the new drives?
AND, as an aside, I don't recall you ever mentioning the OS of the systems
these came out of. It is possible that they aren't even in any SORT of MS
format. 4.3g drives were around when the likes of O/S2 and NeXT OS's were
still around...and let us not forget that Linux runs on PC's too. A low
level format followed by an OS native fdisk may be the only way to go.
AND, it may be (since you said they were WD drives) that the systems they
came out of were so old that they didn't support 1g + HD's without a WD
driver. I had to use one of those on an old DOS 6.22 box once, I think they
called it Drive Rocket or similar? The old DOS didn't support 'large' HD's
and this overlay driver had to be installed to get them to format past 1 GB.
Actually I think it was past 540 MB, can't remember. Either way, this is
buried in the boot sector and needs a reformat to get rid of it for use in a
more current system.