second hard drive problems

Is it a brand new HD or a used one?

Try deleting all the partitions off it and reformatting.  Do this by going to control panel, then administrative tools, then Computer management then under storage look at disk management and read the stats on the drive.

it's an old one .. i had already tried to do what you said but i suppose because it was listing it as a removable stoage device it wasn't giving me those options .. I ended up going into the bios and updating from there .. it now lists it as the correct size but the new problem is now when I error check with both of the options selected it seems to take for ever ie at least half an hour to get a third of the way through .. I'm thinking that there's something physically wrong with it? or does error checking normally take that long?

It should not take that long to check.

Now that you have set the bios correctly, I would go to the manufacterers website and get a low level format tool, just incase anything has gone wrong or something strange has been put on the drive previously.

The low-level format WILL take several hours to complete.  After this go into Windows, right click on MyComputer then select Manage and finally disk management.  Now format the drive from there.

All being well you will have a nice fully functional H/D.  Failing this yes the drive is no good.

Good Luck.

Mike.

Thanks for the points, glad to help.