Try updating the motherboard bios to the latest version.

thanks Andy. anytime you need a Mainframe designed i am your man

Ditto - I have to archive bits of my brain all the time.

the only way I stay sane is to do stuff outside of work like sport or the datto

Thanks for ideas

Leaning towards mother board bios been problem. Bios on this machine wont support more than 2 gig of ram either.

So to keep wife happy, organising her new machine, will put 2 TB drive into it as well, so she can backup onto this drive

Just cause a PC recognizes the drive doesnt mean the BIOS will be happy with it and be able to successfully boot from it. Check that the BIOS is reading the drive correctly. If it allows you to see if the BIOS can Detect the drive and that it configures it correctly. SATA drives dont require jumpers especially in this situation as there is only 2 plugs on a sata cable one to MOBO the other to HDD not like IDE where there are options for Master and slave on the same cable. You can add drives and cables to the system. Make sure the drive you plan to use/boot from is connected to SATA 0 What is your optical drive SATA or IDE ? And what is it set to. If it helps PM me i will give you me number and we can talk through some stuff. This has got to be one of the worst ways to solve PC issues. Give me the system i will have it sorted in no time, Never been real good at theorizing.
Just to add Demacoz has way more experience than me and i would lean towards him if you need more answers I've only been in this game for just over 9 years and the more i learn the more i realize the less i know.

a petabyte (in decimal terms) is a thousand terabytes.

Before you think that's more than anyone could use, I started off in the computer industry 27 years ago when a gigabyte was big.

Also bytes should not to be confused with files ... a petafile has nothing to do with computers

ha jinx demacoz!

...wtf is a petabyte :/?

If the PC can read the drive, then the MB should be able to handle 2tb...do they still have master/slave jumper plugs on them these days?

Actually what Mik said would be ideal...
I have a similar setup
Leave your smaller drive as the boot, install and system drive (500gb is huge for that) and have the 2tb as a physical partition for storage of movies, mp3s, photos, ect

Makes backing up easier and reduces the risk of losing everything in the event of a virus/crash. Shouldn't affect the performance much at all if its SATA. With windows 7 you can use the nifty libraries feature to quickly find yr files too ;)

I always leave the small drive for the operating system and applications that can be reinstalled from original media. Then you just image that once you have your setup right and use the big HDD for data and back it up weekly (and/or setup a raid array). - sorry I am used to designing systems in the Petabytes.

? did you set any of the jumpers on the HDD to Master / slave?

If you have room in there, leave the 500mb one for booting up the use the 2tb to store stuff

First thing that springs to mind is whether your Motherboard supports that size HDD. How old is the system ? Did the installation offer to format the drive ? Did it also offer to install the SATA drivers and give a list to choose from in the early stages of setting up for installation ?