Bent? No bending involved. There is a separate bit which takes the pins :)

sata cables don't take lightly to being bent mind... i hate sata lol wish i'd never bought a sata drive its so gawd damn fussy

Think I need to jump 2 pins, and found a jumper at home. Mint.

Right, I bought a new HDD ages ago. It has just been sitting in the box until now and I'm trying to install it etc.

All connected up fine.

Insert genuine XP Pro disc. Does all its funky stuff, and says that "Setup did not find any hard disk drives installed in your computer".

So then I've tried hitting F6 and using the SATA drivers I have on a Floppy Disc. It's finding that no problem, I'm choosing the XP/Svr2003 setting, yet it still isn't recognising the HDD.

Now my MOBO is standard SATA but the HDD is SATAII. I was told that this would still be compatible, simply running at SATAI speeds and not II.

Is there anything else I should be doing? I'm just a bit stumped. . .