Did some searches and couldn't find this problem in the archives. I have a Dell NT4(SP6a) box at work and a Win98SE box at home. I have a slave drive in a removable mounting that I take to/from the office. Works great in both machines. The slave was installed in the NT box when NT was installed on the master. Recently bought a larger slave drive (new=Western Digital; old=Maxtor) because I was running out of room. Works fine in my Win98 machine, but the NT box won't recognize the new drive -- does not show up in Disk Admin at all. BIOS detects the drive correctly and low-level utilities running under NT detect it as well, but the new drive doesn't exist as far as NT is concerned. If I put the old slave back in it still works fine. All drives on all machines are EIDE. In the NT box, the slave is installed on the secondary IDE channel -- drive 0 is the CD drive and drive 1 is the slave. Jumpers are set correctly. Have also tried the slave on primary IDE channel as well -- doesn't work as a slave there either. If I make the new drive a master it works in the NT box. The new drive has four partitions -- first is FAT16 2GB. The remaining 3 are FAT32, which I can access under NT using "FAT32 for NT" 3rd party driver. I need to figure out how to get NT to be aware of the change in the slave drive. Shouldn't it be automatic during the hardware detect cycle on boot? Is there some utility that can reset NT to see the new drive? Do I need to change something in the registry? Or do I need to bite the bullet and reinstall NT while the new drive is in the box? Any insight would be greatly appreciated. Frank

Clarification. The new drive works in the NT box when it is set up as a master and is the only drive in the box. (A separate version of NT is installed on the slave's FAT16 partition, which allows dual-booting on my home machine). The new drive does not work as a master on secondary IDE channel.

Don't understand. In your NT machine at work both hard drives (old one and the new one) have an NT installation on them? If this is true, the second drive won't be recognized at all. NT looks at the first partition of the first hard drive to boot.

Suggest installing Partition Magic on the first drive and I'll bet it finds your new second drive as "hidden".

More Clarification: The machine at work is configured as follows: Primary IDE channel has a hard drive with NT installed on it on the first partition. This is drive C: and logical drive D: and E: This hard drive is NOT changing -- it remains the boot drive. Secondary IDE has a CD drive and my slave hard drive on it. The old slave drive did not have NT installed on it. The new slave does, though the new drive didn't work before I installed NT either. The old and new slaves are not installed in the box at the same time. I'm trying to trade the old for the new.

I don't see any apparent reason why NT is not detecting your new drive. If it is detected by the BIOS at the startup, then it should be no problem for NT to recognize it. May be one reason, that come sin my mind id that when you added the hdd and NT Disk Administrator asked you to put signature on it, you opted 'no'. Please try it again. Check the jumpers and cables again. Remove the CDROM drive and then try it. I any case Disk Administrator should be able to detect it. Though the problem might get solved by reinstalling Windows NT but that would be too easy a solution and won't have much to learn. Well, I wish I could have opportunity to try and solve this problem. And there is nothing like it can't be detected bcoz windows NT is installed on it.

partition magic - would be my direction... unhide the drive and assain new drive letter.