No hard drives now listed in Disk Management of a well running PC

Hello to all,
Has anyone else ever experienced this ? I'm upgrading and building a new barebones kit with a WD 1 TB drive and I stuck in my old case to format it from my older but still running great PC. Upon entering Disk Management there is no "+" sign out to the left and NO DRIVES ARE LISTED not even my current running "C" drive. Not too long ago I formatted another drive using the same component and it was ALL there, that's how I formatted a drive I put in a external enclose for extra storage. But it's gone now. What am I missing ? This is my 4th barebones kit build to give you some idea of my expertise, not a "guru" but NOT "totally lost" either. Any help would be greatly appreciated ! One last thing, when I first put the drive in the new case I went into the BIOS and set it to "boot from CD ROM" and I NEVER got the Windows install CD to boot, I also never got the default Windows install screen option to "boot from CD" or "boot from HD". I'm pointing fingers at a bad drive but using the bootable rescue disk from KillDisk (that's all I did was boot with it, nothing else) IT DOES "see" the new drive but says the partition is inactive. I've even tried WD bootable HD utility from their website and that won't boot either. HELP !