XP losing my hard drive

[Floridaflyer]

Running XP, I installed a second 40 gig hard drive onto my PC as my 12 gig original drive was almost full
this was about a year ago, all was fine, however a few weeks ago when I booted my PC up, sometimes it would not see my second HD.
I have to go to add hardware, where i See my second drive and click already installed, and it says this is working fine etc.
then once I have done that I can go to computer management
and strorage where my second drive shows up.

So my queston is
why has XP started to not see my second hard drive all of a sudden ? and this dont happen everytime I boot up
maybe 2-3 times a week out of 7

 

[Alan1954]

IT may not be anything to do with XP. I havd a similar problem which turned out to be that the drive was taking a long time to spin up to speed. It wasn't ready when the OS did its hardware check and assumed it had gone. Have a look in BIOS and set set the hard disk up manually instead of AUTO if it is set that way.

 

[gargouille]

Look to Event Viewer logs for clues.
Troubleshooting a similar problem, I was pleasantly surprised to see a message there that the driver had detected a problem with the IDE controller device!
Motherboard was RMA'ed back to MSI...problem solved.

 

[llsmith]

I got this problem when I installed a much used and handled HDD which also disappeared or failed to start on occasion. Turned out to be a damaged power connector on the HDD itself, which seemed a bit loose from the drive itself, fixed with a little duct tape (ala tooltime tips)