BIOS now not recognizing either HARDDRIVE, EMERGANCY please help!

[Han Don]

So for my office computer, i recently bought a 120 gig maxtor pc/mac IDE HD. My computer is a HP Pavillion 753c. When i originally hooked up the HDD using the slave IDE cables, it would be recognized in the bios, and in device manager but not my computer. Thinking it was a jumper problem, i unhooked everything, reset the jumpers on both HDD's and tried reconfiguring everything.
Now, both harddrives wont be recognized in the bios, and i really really cant format my original HD as i need the work that's on there. Right now i have all IDE cables disconnected except the one cable connecting the cpu board to my harddrives, i think i have all the cables in correctly.. is there anything im missing or did i inadvertantly fry both harddrives in my attempts to fix the problem?

[Marcel Burggraeve]

Start with setting the jumpers back to their original spot so both drives will be visible again in the bios and device manager.
If they're on the same cable, set the boot disk to master and the new one to slave.

Most likely your new disk doesn't have a partition and a filesystem on it which explains why it shows in device manager and not in my computer.

Right click 'My Computer'
Select manage
Select disk management
Right click your new disk and from here I'm not sure what the options are called and I can't test it at the moment.
However, from here on it's not that hard to find out what to do.