Holy crap, windows no longer shows my slave hard drive under "my computer". I still have the C drive but its a tiny 4gb HD with little besides windows, IE, and the standard fare. All my movies, music, and a lifetime of writing is on the D. What can I possibly do to make it show up again? Please help, my research paper is on there and its due in a week!

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try booting with a startup disk, choose without cd-rom support, or minimal boot if available, startup disk will create a ramdrive one letter higher then your hard drives that are seen, so at d: type dir and make sure it is your d: hard drive, and not ram drive,
check your ribbon cable, it may need to be reseated, or try a new ribbon cable.
check your bios to see if it is installed.
something else to try is the diagnostic hard drive utilities from your hd manufacturers site, and run a quick test on it.

Ribbon cable is tight, that I know for sure, and operating properly (its a y-cable that runs to both my drives and one drive works so I'm assuming here). BIOS is installed and up to date. Tried the diagnostics from the manufacturer and it says everythings peachy, except for the fact it wants me to partition it. It also mentions something about if I would like to reformat and that is NOT an option.

Its getting late here so I'll try the startup disk tomorrow and report my findings.

Thanks for the help so far,
Steve

All I can suggest is using

Partition Magic 7.0

Its good as far as partitions are concerned

It gives good control over hard disks and also tells u if any part or hard disk is invisible.

Good Luck

Hope it helps you

Well, I used my windows ME startup disk and at the promp, switched to d:, punched in dir, and it showed up with a bunch of stuff thats NOT on my D drive, looks like a bunch of boot files to me, autoexe and whatnot. Its funny because when I start my computer it shows a little something like this:
[###### 3745h83] Primary Master Drive
[Maxtor 5h#####] Primary Slave Drive
[NONE] Secondary Master Drive
[EID 50x CDROM] Secondary Slave Drive
The BIOS shows the maxtor drive (my D) is still on there, windows just doesn't want to see it. Typical windows.

What you are seeing is the ram drive created by the boot disk.
A 98 boot disk may not create this if you do not want it.
In any case your drive will have been bumped to the next letter by windows.
Try e:dir and see if your stuff is there.
If desperate pull the drive and take it to another working machine and copy all oyu stuff before messing with fixes.

Good luck
Greaner

In windows goto a command prompt and type fdisk /status. Post back what it shows. This should show the information on both of your drives.

hello
from a:d: click enter
d:dir /p click enter
you are mostlikely getting dos shortend names for long name windows file
windows~1 dir ect
does drive d; have an o/s? if so what?
if its just stored files you can copy most of them from dos to drive c:
d:copy myfile~1 c:myfile~1 click enter
its slow but will recover your info
if you need to get spacific files out of folder you will need the complete path
d:copy myfile~1\testpaper c:myfile~1\testpaper
no space between c:myfile~1\ and the back slash
and back slash is needed for path
have a nice day

Tried e:dir = says E is not a valid drive.

Here's what fdisk puked out:

Fixed Disk Drive Status
Disk Drv Mbytes Free Usage
1 4028 100%
C: 4028
2 39080 39080 %

Dave, drive d has no OS. Its just there for me to store computer games, documents, and other stuff on. I'll get right on your suggestion if the chart above doesn't yield us any clues (I'm thinking it does).

Well it reformatted my chart :(
Lemme try again:
......................Fixed Disk Drive Status

..Disk...Drv...Mbytes...Free...Usage
....1...........4028..................100%
..........C:....4028
....2..........39080..........39080....%

I just noticed....39080 free??!?!?!?!

That drive was 20% full!
Say it isn't so!!....

I assume your second drive is a 40 gig drive. It looks like the drive is not formatted. To verify that this is so you could connect it as master and use a boot disk to try and access the hard drive. From what I see, it doensnt look good. Some places offer disaster recovery services for a fee.