Ok, I need some serious help here, if anyone can help me. I got a new Gateway about 4 months ago, and I immediately installed my slave drive from my old computer. It has been working fine, but I did one of those little windows updates and rebooted, and when I rebooted my other drive wouldn't show up. So far I've changed IDE cables, and also swapped the power cable on that drive, and can't get it to reappear. I did a system recovery on XP, where you can go back to a certain date, and went back before the update, and found that the update wasn't the problem. I believe that I can feel the drive spinning, but I'm not sure if the vibration that I feel is from the other HD. Oh yeah, I've also attempted to reinstall, and install the drive again to no avail. If anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. I'm going to attempt trying the drive on a different IDE channel, and see if that works. But if anyone has any other ideas, please let me know. Thanks!

reboot in F8 and log in as last known good configuration.

If you have logged on, last known good won't work. Well, because considers successful logons a last known good. Try using the repair feature on the XP CD. Just boot from the CD and choose repair once you are prompted. What happens when you go into the Disk Management tool (right click My Computer -> Manage-> Disk Management). Do you see the drive. You can make it active here by right clicking on it. You can also change the drive letter. I hope this helps, Mike

Is it detected in BIOS? IF not then it may be dead. Check hardware options first such as swapping it to different IDE cable. Try new cables. They're cheap enough. If BIOS cannot detect it on any cable in either master or slave settings then it's probably landfill. You can go to a data recovery specialist if there's data on it you absolutely have to recover but expect a nosebleed at the cost.

if it did this after a update you could try add and remove programs and unstalling the update(hot fix)..some of them you can. else maybe you can roll back the driver of the IDE device. But i suspect it is a fault on your M/B or with your bios... i had a similar problem with a pc under win98..a clean install fixed it so who knows.. good luck

Hmm, ok, I tried everyone's ideas, and to no avail. The HD isn't showing up in the BIOS, I have even tried installing it in another Windows XP machine, and that computer failed to recognize it (I'm running XP Professional, and the other box was XP Home...don't think it matters though). I think the HD is still spinning, at least I think I feel a vibration on it, and there are no "clunking" sounds coming from it. If anybody else has any ideas, please feel free to enlighten me. I would be GREATLY appreciative!!!! I'd rather get help here than spend $800+ to get the data recovered...and who knows if the guy I lined up for it will be able to do it. Thanks again.