Well I could use a little help here, the rest of my computer seems to be running fine, however, my second hard drive seems to of disappeared from windows. It shows up in bios, it shows up when I reinstall vista, but it doesn't "show up" in windows itself, not accessible. In windows it seems to be healthy and already partitioned under admintools>computer management, disabling and reenabling didn't do anything, also appears in device manager, but doesn't show up under mycomputer and does not seem in anyway accessible. The only hardware change I have made recently is installing a new sound card, though I don't know how they would be related. Can I workaround this by unplugging my cdrom from the hardrive area of the motherboard?

Did you assign a drive letter to that partition? "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

I would like to know how to do that :D, it was drive E before and then stopped registering in vista.

It is listed as a primary partition at the moment and doesn't have a drive assigned to it...

I tried assigning a drive letter in disk management, however when I right click the HDD it only gives me the help option.... In Disk management this inaccesible drive says it is online, heallthy (eisa configuration), is not partitioned and is listed as a primary partition. I don't know how to assign a letter to it outside of Disk Management and it wont let me do anything but select the help option in disk management.

Might be an issue with how bios see's it then and now if you did have data on it. Might have to run a linux live cd to see if it can mount the partition. Otherwise you may have to format it. "Best Practices", Event viewer, host file, perfmon, antivirus, anti-spyware, Live CD's, backups, are in my top 10

This happened to me when I tried to add a secondary IDE drive to a computer that came out of the box with a primary SATA drive. Turns out that Vista somehow thought my IDE drive was an "EISA Configured" drive, which is normally used for OEM System Restore info. The Disk Management snap-in prevents you from doing anything to any partition that it believes to be a System Restore partition. The only way I found to fix it is to use the DISKPART command-line utility to reset the partition type back to a normal NTFS partition, not an EISA (restore) partition. As an added bonus, this will leave any data that was on the partition intact. Here's how: Use at your own risk - Microsoft's help file for the SETID command suggests that only OEM's and IT Pro's should be meddling with this. You can mess up your partitions if you use the wrong ID! This walkthrough assumes your partition is NTFS (code 07) - if not, go look up the right code and use it instead! Start > All Programs > Accessories > Right-Click Command Prompt > Run as Administrator DISKPART LIST DISK SELECT DISK [id of the disk with the errant partition] LIST PARTITION SELECT PARTITION [id of the errant partition] DETAIL PARTITION (Confirm that the ID is 27. 27 is the hex code for OEM reserved partitions.) SET ID=07 (07 is the hex code for regular NTFS partitions) You can now use either DISKPART or the Disk Management snap-in to assign a drive letter to the newly unlocked volume.