Removable hard drive not seen

[Guest]

I have a 1.7GHz Pentium 4, Asus P4T, Intel 850 chipset, 512MB Rambus, 4 installed drives, two on an ATA 133 card. The 5th is a removable bay, a secondary slave to the DVD writer, which is attached to the motherboard

I installed a new system drive using Western Digital's software to make it see the whole 160GB, then formatted with XP, then downloaded SP1.

My removable hard drive was no longer recognized. I took it out and put in a new removable drive bay and it has not been recognized, either.

A few months ago, I took my computer to a shop because of a problem. They put in a new system drive and told me the removable drive that was in there at the time no longer worked, although it had worked fine before I brought in the computer. I gave them another--never used--removable drive to replace it, and they said that one didn't work either. I urged them to try both on other computers and they later said neither worked on any computer. The owner put in an old removable drive that worked fine--until I changed system drives the other day. I also bought new two new ones, and one of those (previously unused) is now in my computer

Is there a setting that will make the drive work?

 

[Cari \(MS MVP\)]

Right click on My Computer and select Manage. On the following screen,
select Disk Management. Drive should appear on the right side of the
screen. Assign it a new drive letter.


--
Cari (MS-MVP Windows Client - Printing, Imaging & Hardware)
www.coribright.com

I have a 1.7GHz Pentium 4, Asus P4T, Intel 850 chipset, 512MB Rambus, 4

installed drives, two on an ATA 133 card. The 5th is a removable bay, a
secondary slave to the DVD writer, which is attached to the motherboard.

I installed a new system drive using Western Digital's software to make it

see the whole 160GB, then formatted with XP, then downloaded SP1.

My removable hard drive was no longer recognized. I took it out and put in

a new removable drive bay and it has not been recognized, either.

A few months ago, I took my computer to a shop because of a problem. They

put in a new system drive and told me the removable drive that was in there
at the time no longer worked, although it had worked fine before I brought
in the computer. I gave them another--never used--removable drive to replace
it, and they said that one didn't work either. I urged them to try both on
other computers and they later said neither worked on any computer. The
owner put in an old removable drive that worked fine--until I changed system
drives the other day. I also bought new two new ones, and one of those
(previously unused) is now in my computer.

 

[Guest]

I don't see the answer I wrote earlier, so here it is again

The drive doesn't show up anywhere in Windows that I have looked including Disk Management. The BIOS lists a primary master and slave and secondary master and slave. All said Auto. When I clicked on the first three, it named the drives. When I clicked on the secondary master, it still only said auto--whether or not there was a hard drive in the tray. The two drives on a controller card weren't listed. Is there a setting? A missing driver? I think I didn't mention that I'm using XP Professional.

 

[Guest]

When I installed my new system drive, I changed from the pointer on my keyboard to a regular mouse, because that was the only way the Western Digital software would show the right menus. I just changed back to the pointer and suddenly the removable drive showed up in My Computer with the right drive letter and all its files. BUT..

I took out that drive and inserted another one, and the drive was invisible again. Windows said H referred to something that was no longer there. I put back the drive that had just worked and it, too, was not visible, either in My Computer or Disk Management. (I turned off the computer between steps.

Since it worked for a moment, presumably it can work again. But what does this show about how that can happen?