Disappearing Hard Drive!

[Daskies]

Hello, all.

I've just now installed a secondary Hard Drive onto my machine. I formatted it to be NSTC (I'm not sure that's the abbreviation, but it's the one windows xp uses [at least by default]). The first time I launched windows after that I got a message that said "New Found hardware [hd name here]" and after a few seconds the drive appeared under "my computer". I tryed to copy over a ton of files, and I realized that just wasn't going to work, so I hit quit, and after a few seconds it stopped trying to copy, and an error message that said something about my hard drive lagging (I can't be more specific as it came out of the corner of the screen, and disappeared fast). I then went to check, and I saw that the drive was no longer listed. I tried restarting, and still, nothing. If it matters my main hard drive (the one windows is installed on) is SATA, and this one is IDE-ATA (The cable goes from the CD/DVD burner to the secondary HD, and then to the computer).

If someone could give me advice on how to get the hard drive listed again, on a management software, or anything else on this matter it'd be greatly appreciated.

(Windows XP SP2)

[the_nets_edge]

When adding the IDE hard drive, you need to make sure that the CD-rom is jumpered to indicate it is the 'slave' and the hard drive is jumpered to indicate 'master with slave present'

jumpers are little black (normally) pieces of plastic with metal inside, acting like a switch.

You should also verify during POST (power on self test) that the hard drive is being detected correctly. You may have to enter 'setup' during post and make changes (set ide drives to 'auto-detect' is best)

You may also need to 'turn off the commercial' or 'show diagnostic info during post' not sure what your pc may call it.

Hope that works for you.

The Nets Edge

[submix8c]

Also, in XP (and other NT-types?) you need to "mount" (?) the new HDD in "Administrative Tools"/"Disk Management", i.e. assign it a Drive Letter. Not sure about "auto-assignment"; don't recollect adding an unformatted HDD to my OPSYS, but just go there and check that a Drive Letter is assigned. Use "F1" key from the Desktop and search within Help for Disk Management; should tell you how to "get there from here".

HTH as well...