Could sure use some help. Thanks to anyone who replies.

I have 2 HDD, both Maxtors. 1st is a 60gig and is the master. The 2nd is a 40gig (two FAT32 20gig partitions)and is in a retractable bay which I swap back and forth with my computer at school (w2k DomainController). This HD is for storage.

Here's the problem: Every once in a while the second HD is not detected by the w2k computers (rebooting a few times usually fixes this, but not recently!) In Disk Management w2k sees it but says it's unallocated space. I have a second computer at home running winXP pro. When I insert the portable HD into the XP machine, it is detected. Then I put it back into the w2k machine and it gets detected just fine (weird). Although this has stopped working too (recently).

I don't want to reformat the drive and I shouldn't have to. What is happening?
Any suggestions?
Here are my specs:
w2k-professional
AMD xp1600+
256MB pc21000 micron
ASUS mobo A7A-266
pioneer DVD-rom 16x secondary MASTER
cdrw 16x10x40x primary SLAVE
HDD 60gig Maxtor primary MASTER
HDD 40gig Maxtor secondary SLAVE
7500 Radeon 64DDR
Dlink 538tx NIC 10/100
3COM/USR winmodem-fax 56K

Thanks 4 the help!

I've had some problems with retractable hard drive bays and it usually points to jumper settings on the hard drive. Before plugging the drive into the problem computer, try setting the jumper settings on the drive to cable select instead of master or slave. Play around with the settings and see if you have any luck.