I was istalling Windows XP SP2 on my machine and my machine crashed during the download of the patch. I received a blue screen and rebooted. Upson reboot, I now notice that my computer cannot detect my hard drive anymore. Any ideas what happenned or what I can do to fix this?

Reinstall XP and start over! 808

If your PC cannot detect the hard drive, start by checking the physical connections - they may have been badly seated in the first place & just chose the wrong moment to completely drop out. Next try swapping the drive onto another IDE channel - you'll probably get a message saying you can't boot from IDE2 or whatever, but at least you can check if it's a drive or IDE problem. If you can, borrow another drive to try swapping out anyway. "I know that I'm mad - I've always been mad..."

I had a similar experience when my computer froze while installing SP2. After rebooting I was able to access the desktop normally except the "Add New Hardware" program launched and said that my IDE Channel was not installed correctly. My hard drive is working fine. I've resorted to System Restore but am having problems finding a system checkpoint the computer likes. Any advice will be greatly appreciated.