I have installed a second hardrive on the IDE2 socket of my PCI 100Mhz card that came with my system. My first Hardrive is setup as a master and the other hardrive is setup as a slave. Both devices show working prope rly... but Windows ME does not assign a letter to the second hardrive and so it is not accessible. The drive letter box in both of the hardrives properties are grayed out... one says c: for the master and the propertie s for the slave hardrive is empty. At first I thought that it was a letter assignment conflict so I bumped both of the CD devices to letters E: through z:. I now have a c:, e:, and f: but still will not assign the d: to the second hardrive. I though this was a controller issue. I have also tryed to use the EIDE from the mother board and the same thing happens...My first Hardrive is setup as a master and the other hardrive is setup as a slave. Both device s show working properly... but Windows ME does not assign a letter to the second hardrive and so it is not accessible. The drive letter box in both of the hardrives properties are grayed out... one says c: for the mast er and the properties for the slave hardrive is empty. Both drives show on the BIOS setup... so I know that the harddrive is working! Can you help... why is Windows Me not assigning a letter to my slave hard rive? Note: I had the same configuration on my Dimension T550 running Windows ME and it worked fine.

Did you run FDISK and FORMAT your second HDD? If not, Windows can't see the drive.

I am having the same problem. I think it may have something to do with the operating system the drive was fdisked/formatted with. I am trying to transfer data files from a win95(OSR2) system which is using fat32(i think...) This disk works fine in the original system, but WinME will not give it a drive letter if I set it up in the new system as a slave. I even tried it the other way around, setting the old drive as master and the new(winme) drive as slave. They still can't access one another. I hope there is a way around this, as I don't want to transfer a couple of gigs of accounting data via zip disk. 8-P If I find the answer, I'll post it here.

I have the same exact problem with my Pioneer DVD 103S drive. So the problem can not have anything to do with formatting. The weird thing is that if I totally reinstall, as I have done once or twice the drive will show up THE FIRST TIME I go in. After that it disappears. It shows up under the Device Manager but not in the Explorer. This is really frustrating. I have a dual boot system and it all works fine under 2000 Prof, so I know it is NOT a hardware problem.

I ALSO experience the exact same thing, I however have a 20GB SAMSUNG hard drive, series SV2042D. The PC says that it detects the drive during boot up, but neither DOS nor WINDOWS assign it any drive letter. Still a Diagnostics program made by SAMSUNG could access the drive in DOS, despite it not having any drive letter. The program reported everything as OK. How can I format the damn thing when it does not even show up in DOS?!?

Installing a prog such as EZ-BIOS should solve the problem, some bios's cannot access FAT32 drives...

I had the same problem, but it was with the 2nd CD rom. I had 2 HDD mapped c-g, 2 removable disks mapped H - I, and two CD-rom drives, J-K. No matter what I did, the system would not assign drive letters beyond K. (Even tried a lastdrive=z in config.sys). After messing around with it for too long, I gave up and dropped out the syquest drive and now have C-J. Note that even though it would not assign a letter to K, the drive was recognized. FRUSTRATING!!