Okay, here's what has happened: Currently, my system features the following components: Hard drive 1. Western Digital, 13 GB, ATA66. Uses a controller card to take full advantage of the increased speed because the motherboard does not support ATA66. Only drive on the primary port on the controller card. Hard drive 2. Quantum, 2.5 GB, ATA33. Came with the computer, now serves as a second hard drive. Uses the controller card, and is the only drive on the second port. With the hard drives on the controller card, the onboard IDE ports are freed up for other drives. On the Primary IDE port is a Lite-On DVD-ROM, set as master, and a Yamaha CD-RW, set as slave. On the Secondary IDE port is a Panasonic 100 MB Zip drive. The Zip drive is set as master, and nothing more is on the cable. I have an AMD K6-2 running at 500 MHz, 192 MB RAM, and operate under Windows Millennium Edition. Everything works fine as it is. Then a friend gave me his old hard drive. A Western Digital 20-GB ATA66. That made three hard drives. My plan was to keep the old Quantum on the same cable as it's always used and set up the 20-GB as master with the current 13-GB as slave. I partitioned and formatted the new hard drive as desired, set up Windows Millennium Edition, and proceeded to reinstall all the other cards and drives. No problems. Then I noticed the Zip drive was not being assigned a drive letter. I had disabled the Secondary IDE port, through which it is connected, for the Windows installation because the presence of the Zip drive slows the beginning of Windows Setup way down. I enabled the Secondary IDE port to bring the Zip drive back, but I found that Windows was denying the Zip drive a letter. It does appear in Device Manager, though, as IOMEGA ZIP 100 under "Hard disks." I have both the current hard drive--the one I'm using now as I type this--and the new one "hooked up." Both are plugged in to the power, and I simply move the cable between them to switch back and forth as I set up the new one. An interesting thing about that is, all things being equal (connections, jumpers, etc.), the Zip drive comes up fine when the current drive is connected, but fails when the new drive is connected. Same connections everywhere else. Just different hard drives. That's the issue I'm facing. Why is the Zip drive not being assigned a drive letter when the new hard drive is hooked up? I appreciate the help. I'm stumped. Arthur

You have an unorthodox way of hooking up your MoBo ide and the controller card setups. First see that your contoller cards are set properly in the Device manager and that your hard drives are all recognized and assigned properly. In you BIOS, be sure the hard drives are read as automatic. Is there not a MOBO flash bios that will let you recognize the ATA66?? It appears your "new" harddrive is bumping the Zip drive (may be assigned the same IRQ ???

Wilbur, I thank you for your input. I have at last determined, though, what is at cause in this matter. It finally dawned on me that there was a difference between the two main hard drives. The current one was fully formatted, but the newest had only been partly so. After partitioning, I had formatted drive C only--the only one I needed at the time--and left the others till later. Though unformatted, Windows assigned drive letters to those remaining drives, and for a reason that escapes me definitively, the Zip drive was denied one seemingly because those others lacked a valid DOS format. Why the Zip drive was the only one that had trouble, I'm not sure. The optical drives had no trouble even without that proper formatting. Once I formatted all the partitions on the new hard drive, the Zip drive was given its own letter without a hitch. Problem solved. Thanks again. Arthur

By the way, Wilbur, you mentioned that the way I set things up was unorthodox. That's not the first time someone has told me that. What is a normal setup? I'm guessing the hard drive would be connected to the Primary IDE port on the motherboard as master, and the CD/DVD-ROM would plug in as slave. If I had a brand new system, that's probably the way I would do it. And then a CD/DVD writer would be master on the Secondary IDE, and the Zip drive (yes, I do like Zip) would be slave to it. Something like that. For now I'm working with some very dated components, but they all come together very well. :-) Arthur