windows xp does not see my second hard drive at start up

[Guest]

I built an xp pro sp1 system to run a video surveillance system at my soon to
be new home while I am not there. I purchased a used western digital 120gb
hard drive from a computer show to store the video files. Lucky for me the
drive works. I first tried to format with windows but no luck. so I used
western digitals software to format it as an NTFS drive.
My problem is that when the system boots it does not see the 120gb drive but
if I right click on My computer and select properties, then the hardware tab,
then device manager and highlight the disk drive and click "scan for hardware
changes". Then it recognizes the 120gb drive and under my computer, manage it
says the drive is healthy.
How can I get xp pro to recognize the drive at startup?

 

[Rich Barry]

Robert, is it slaved to your main hard drive? I would try cable select
if yes. Also, try formatting the drive from MyComputer when you get it to
work next time and assign it a drive letter. If your drive is connected as
master on
the secondary IDE channel then make sure that is enabled in the Bios.

 

[Guest]

Thanks Rich
Your help led me to figure out that I pluged the slave conector into the HD
rather then the master.
Thanks again.
Rob