Hello. I have 4 internal hard drives in my XP SP2 desktop. I can only see 3 of them after turning it on but after restarting once all 4 magically reappear. This has been happening for a while. What is wrong? How do I solve this? Can anyone help? Do I need to reinstall Windows? For the record, the missing one is my 4th drive and is an UltraATA/IDE device. Thank you.
You could open up your pc and make sure all the cables are attached real good. Also, try booting into the BIOS and see if it can see all 4 of them, if it can then it may be a windows problem.
Thanks for the reply. When the PC boots up sometimes the 4 hard drives appear in the BIOS and sometimes not but this doesn't seem to affect whether the drive is visible. For the last few weeks it has always reappeared on the 1st restart after rebooting, the one exception being when I got a 'CMOS Checskum error - defaults loaded' message and it started up normally with all 4 drives. My DVD drive is missing also and hardly ever shows up even after a reboot. The 4th hard drive and the DVD drive were sharing the same IDE cable but even after disconnecting the DVD drive the same thing happens with the 4th hard drive. I have opened up the PC and it seems connected OK.
Is you power supply strong enough to run all of those hard drives and burners? Doesn't sound like it is.
It's 450w and used to run the 4 hard drives and the DVD burner fine. Is 450w enough? Had these problems since reinstalling XP but not straight after reinstalling.
