Going by the 'look at the last thing you did' theory, try disconnecting the new hard drive, setting up ide devices in the bios, and booting from a startup disk or other boot disk. If that works, the problem is with the new hard drive, if it doesnt, there is something else wrong. The 8meg thing is a bios issue, it cant recognize a larger drive, the answer there is to install a bios overlay program (available from the drive manufacturer) or upgrade the bios of the motherboard (does not always address this problem) Let us know what happens, and we'll go from there