Booting problems with HDD unable to format but detecting

My friend gave me his computer to sort out some problems he was facing. I found it very difficult to troubleshoot.

Firstly, computer detected all the present drives i.e cdrom, HD1 and HD2, would not boot. It would just display the windows xp startup screen and restart. the first thing i did was to slave one of the hard drives to my computer. The hard drive was detected, and it contained just 2 files. But the problem is, i could not format it.

I then tried the second HDD, at first i caused my computer to restart without prompting me to do so. After the boot, the HDD was ditacted but could not be opened. In an attempt to open it it would display the msg "the disk is not formatted do u want to format it?". I said yes, but it could not complete the formatting.

Can anyone help me with a solution

Topic title modified.

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start a fresh boot and reinstall wondows.

i cant do so, because when i connect the HDD1 and HDD2 back to the original PC, i get an error about the HDDs. It says secondary slave error, secondary master error. The jumper settings are correct, but it now don't work