I've spent over 7 hours trying to make this work. I found someone else on this forum that had a similar problem, but the answer didn't help me. I added a second 40GB Maxtor hd to my emachine running XP home edition. I used the original Max-Blast Maxtor software that came with the disk to partition it (extended dos partition) and formated it (within Max-Blast) using a boot disk made from WinXP. (BTW, the boot disk says Millenium on several screens that appear when using it?) I just formatted it as a FAT32, figuring that I could change it once windows sees it. Diskmgmt.msc does not see it. XP does not see it. Bios sees it and everything is ok within the CMOS setup screens. It also shows up on the bootup screen as correct. Device Manager doesn't see it either. Additional info if it helps: When I try and use any FDISK program, there is no drive letters shown, only disk numbers. The first disk is fromatted as a NTFS disk. When I exit out of any FDISK program, the DOS prompt doesn't see either of the hard disks, if that helps. I tried removing the 'cable select' jumper to make it a slave. I tried adding it to another cable inplace of a CDROM. I'm stuck. I don't even know what to do next to try and troubleshoot it.I've spent the last 2 hours searching for answers. Any help would be very much appreciated. It is my understanding that if the BIOS sees it, it SHOULD show up in disk management, so you can work with it and partition and format it. According to Seagate, this is how simple it should be, but looking at all the forum members that have problems, something's wrong someplace. http://www.seagate.com/support/kb/disc/howto/install_xp_disk_mgmt.html

Start with a Windows 98 boot disk, and start up Fdisk. Select Option 4 to display the current hard disks, and then option 5 to select disk 2. After you have done this, delete any partitions that are on it, and creat a new primary DOS partition. After you have done this, restart your computer with the boot disk, and try and formad D:\. You will appear more intelligent if you use these words properly: Lose, Loose, Accept, Except.

Go back in with fdisk and make the partition on the second HDD active.

Hi y'all, Did you make the first partition on the new drive, a "Primary partition"? and as Dave02, suggested, make it "active" beansoup "Error: Keyboard not attached." "Press F1 to continue."

WOW! Quick responses! I have not tried any of your suggestions yet. What I have done since posting my original message was; I noticed that the primary ide channel has a 80 conductor ultra ATA cable (blue/grey/black). The secondary channel has a ATA33 40 conductor cable (black/black/black). Since the Maxtor 40GB disk is a couple of years old, I put it on the secondary ide channel as the master, removing a DVD burner on that channel. The system works correctly. XP and all it's utilities see it, even explorer. I formatted it as a NTFS file system just to test it. it worked. So, I put my DVD burner onto the slave position on the primary ide channel but XP didn't detect it. I tried every jumper setting and still no go. So, Here's what I've got so far; The disk is good. XP CAN see it as the master on the secondary ide channel. I can't seem to get XP (although the BIOS sees everything) to see anything that I put on the primary slave ide channel. I did a lot of research and found that you can mix old and new drives on a 80 conductor cable without problems. Here's what has me stumped at this point. 1. I thought maybe the primary ide channel cable was bad, but the BIOS picks up everything I put on it (as slave). 2. I need all four drives (2-hd, 2-DVD burners), yet nothing seems to work as the slave on the primary ide channel. I would try your suggestions, but at this point, I'm assuming that the disk is partitioned and formatted and active. I do want to thank all of you for your VERY QUICK responses. I'm really impressed! It's 3:30 am here and my eyes are shutting. I think I'll sleep on this. Maybe I might have a new idea in the morninig. I do welcome any ideas, and if you think I'm wrong for not trying your ideas, please let me know and I will try them. At this point, I don't know if it's XP, the motherboard, the cable, or the drives. jeff

I'd suggest you double check the jumper configurations for your boot drive on the primary IDE channel. Some hard drives have different jumper settings for Master with no slave and Master with a slave. If this is the case with your boot hard drive, this could explain why you cannot get anything to work as a slave on the primary IDE. Michael J

Michael J, The primary master is a Seagate drive. I have tried setting the jumpers to: Master 7/8 Cable Select 5/6 and even putting a jumper on 7/8 and 5/6 as their website suggests when you can't get a non ATA slave working with their drive as a master. None of these setting have any affect whatsoever. They all produce the same results. Master works, slave doesn't (in XP). If you have a particular jumper setting that you think may work that I haven't tried, I would be happy to try it. What I don't understand is that the computer sees everything that I put on the primary slave. The bios shows all the correct information on what is on the primary slave. Utilities can interact with whatever is on the primary slave. Why can't winxp see it? I'm begining to think this has something to do with a bug in XP and not the hardware. Any more ideas?