Code 42 (duplicate device) w/3 Maxtor Drives

[biff]

Given 3 Maxtor 250 Gig drives on a new P4 system.
IDE 0 - Master/Slave and IDE 1 Master (IDE 1 Slave = DVD)

All 3 detect full capacity by Bios and XP Setup.

All 3 can take a clean XP install with new partition and
format.

All motherboard drivers installed and operating.
Maxtor big_drive_enabler (137 Gig barrier) run to update
registry (no effect one-way-or-another).

In Interactive XP, only 2 hard drives can ever be seen.
The third is marked yellow in Device Manager with Code 42
(duplicate device)

Windows Explorer correctly skips the drive letter of the
inactive drive.

The inactive drive can be the Master or Slave on either
IDE channel depending on which drive is booted.

Thanks in advance for help, Biff

 

[biff]

Update: When the Maxtor Drives are C: D: and E:,
D: is the disappearing drive and a disabled Maxtor drive
shows in the Device Manager under Disk Drives.

If all drives are "uninstalled" in Device Manager,
including the working ones, followed by a reboot,
all three drives appear briefly in Explorer, but
right after "New Hardware Found" pops-up, the D: drive
disappears and is disabled again with the Code 42 error.

If you can quickly explore the D: drive, BEFORE the
New Hardware message appears, the driver stays loaded
and all 3 drives show in XP for the session.

I have fashioned a crude work-around by inserting a
simple text file from the D: drive into the Startup
Group, so after rebooting, the file is opened on D:
using Notepad which keeps Windows from unloading
the device driver for D:.

This is a bug with windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys
which can't seem to handle 3 drives at one time of the
exact same model.

Any feedback is appreciated, Biff