2nd HD disappears in WIN XP

[atomicdave]

I just updated my OS to WIn XP. Since then, my 2nd HD (secondary master) will be forgotten by Windows after a period of time.
If I go the the Device Manager, and 'right-click' to locate new hardware, Windows finds the drive again, only to forget it again in the future.

When I boot-up the BIOS and Win XP detect the hard drive, and when it is being recongnized, it performs properly, but I cannot figure out why it keeps disappearing. This never happened upder WIN 98 or ME, so I am thinking the problem may be related to Win XP.

I have changed the power connector, replaced the Ultra ATA drive ribbon, and successfully run the 'PowerMax' diagnostic (from Maxtor).

Does any one have an idea on how to fix it? (The Maxtor techs don't!)

 

[atomicdave]

I have just tried re-configuring the 2nd hard drive to be the primary slave, and took the cd-rom and made it the secondary master. So far over the last 5 hours, the hard drive has not disappeared, the cd-rom at first acted a little buggy and did not want to display disc contents in My Computer or Explorer, but auto-ran and played audio discs just fine.
After a few re-boots it looks like the cd-rom came around and now shoes disc contents correctly.

I'll watch for any changes in the future.
Does anyone know a better way to configure the drives, or increase the stability of the cd-rom?

 

[Guest_imported]

Try booting off a floppy and running FDISK. Do both drives show DOS partitions? I noticed you mentioned Maxtor. Are you using Maxtor's EZBios on one of the drives? I won't go into detail on what that does, but if you are using that, Windows may not be able to see the boot sector on the drive. Try to uninstall it using the original Maxtor disk.