Computer Question: Windows ME does not recognize 2nd hard drive

[Shagnasty]

I am not usually one to post computer questions here because I am a professional software developer that can handles things myself 99% of the time. However, this problem has me stumped.

Here is the problem. My wife brought a computer home from work that no longer recognizes the 2nd installed hard drive (Drive D. BIOS recognizes it on start-up and the hardware is set up correctly (I installed it myself and it worked fine for over 4 months). The hard drive is a 10gb Maxtor drive. The operating system is Windows ME. The problem started when a co-worker tried to attach a Zip drive to the computer. I have no idea what she did but Drive D: is now recognized as the CD-ROM drive and the 2nd hard drive is no where to be found.

I have reinstalled Windows ME on the primary hard drive with no luck. Any other ideas on how I can make windows recognize the secondary slave hard drive?

[LordVor]

Hmmm... IDE zip drive? If so then I count 2 hard drives, a cdrom drive, and a zip drive. That's two masters and two slaves, and you probably want to make sure that all the devices are jumpered properly. If the 2nd drive was, say, the master on the secondary bus, and the zip drive was installed as a master, then this problem could result.

Next thing I'd try is booting from a dos floppy and seeing how many hard drives showed up. If the second drive doesn't show up in DOS, then it's almost gotta be a hardware thing.

Last, just take out the zip drive, and see if that fixes anything.

-LV

[Ringo]

If somebody tried to install a zip drive, they may have monkeyed with the 2nd HDD's connections. If your power connection and data cable connection are OK, and your jumper(s) is (are) still set for the slave configuration and it still is not recognized, you might try temporarily installing it in another machine, just to see if it works. I've had trouble with Maxtor drives in the past.

Good luck!

[octothorpe]

I had a similar problem once. Try this:
Click Start, click Run, in the 'open' dialog box type regedit (this will open your registry editor), click the edit dropdown list and select find, in the resulting dialog box type lastdrive. The registry will be searched for a bit and a 2-pane window should open with lastdrive highlighted in the right-hand pane. There will be a letter in parenthesis (possibly D or E), if the letter is not "Z", change the letter to "Z".

If that is not the problem, and you have TweakUI installed (not sure if you have it in ME, if you do, it will be in the control panel), open it and click on the My Computer tab. Put a check mark in all the boxes and reboot.

Actually, do the TweakUI thing first; there's no sense messing with the registry if you don't have to.

And Don't mess with the registry without knowing how to restore the previous version (go to the Microsoft Knowledge Base for instructions).

This sounds like the problem as you mentioned that the BIOS recognises your drive on boot-up.

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[handy]

maybe they put the HD that was set to 'slave' as a 'master' on the secondary board port, which would cause it to be seen probably by the cmos but not by windows.....

see, the slave HD might have been connected as a master which would cause it to not be seen when postioned as master or vice versa..

[Xploder]

Jeez handy don't you ever read any of the responses prior to posting??? That point was brought up TWICE already.

As for TweakUI, I'm not sure if it works with ME but you can get another free utility called TweakALL that does a LOT more and is extremely user friendly.

[Tattva]

Well, from reading the OP

I installed it myself and it worked fine for over 4 months....

The problem started when a co-worker tried to attach a Zip drive to the computer.

It sounds like the OP knows about jumper settings if he installed it himself. (Plus the BIOS recognizes the hard drive.)

Also, to me it sounds like the coworker tried to attach either a parallel/USB external Zip drive, not an internal IDE. That issue could be clarified.

My bet is that in the installation of the Zip drive, she chose a drive designation that matched that (or somehow overwrote that) of the Maxtor hard drive. You might try uninstalling the Iomega software, or get that TweakUI program. I don't know off the top of my head if either of those will fix the problem, assuming this is the actual problem.

[handy]

Xploder, must have missed it but anyway, its all the better that more than one person says the same thing :-)

IM not too fond of remote computer diagnosis myself.

[astro]

I had this happen the other day and it was a munged up FAT table. Sounds like you might also have a damaged FAT table on the 2nd drive possibly because of something the install program did to the 2nd drive accidently trying to write to it like a USB disk which would have given the hard drive a Very Serious Bellyache. Norton 2002 or Partition Magic similar can usually detect these FAT errors and correct them without loss of data.

For some reason it wouldn't auto-repair in the PC it was in and I had to remove it and slave it to my home PC for Nortons/Partiton Magic to fix it. Put it back into the original PC and all was well.

It's a thought.

[octothorpe]

Anybody else here curious as to how this turned out?

Did Shagnasty suffer a complete meltdown? Will he get his (unmentionable) box to work? Will the Zip© drive finally settle down and play well with others? Are we to blame?

The answers to these questions, and more, can only be provided by the nasty one himself. Oh, Shagnasty where art thou?

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[handy]

maybe he couldn't get it back on the net :-)