Maximum PC

Help (a common first line here I suspect)

My data drive - a 120 gig WD drive - has an annoying habbit of disappearing on boot. I have to go into the device manager and tell it to search for devices every time (twice each time in fact) to get it recognized by WinXP Pro. The hard drive is recognized by the bios just fine. Well, maybe a bit slowly since so many services are running on the motherboard like both ethernet systems. But I really don't think the motherboard is the problem here as everything is recognized every time without a problem. It's just in WinXP that there's a problem.

I suspect my problem is one or more disabled windows services. But which ones. Tweaking is risky so this is probably my fault. I really don't want to go back to windows default service set up but will if I have to.

Any suggestions?

Motherboard: Asus A7N8X Deluxe 2.0, Bios 1006
CPU: 2700+
Mem: 512 PC 3200 RAM
Video: ATI 9700 All in Wonder Pro
Boot drive SCSI 18 Gig I can't remember manu
Data Drive: WD 1200 JB
CD - RW & DVD-Rom drives too, both Lite-On

could be a hardware problem like the ide cable. try changing out the cable and see if the problem goes away.

So does the drive not even show up in the Device Manager, or Disk Management?

If xp is on the scsi drive, do you have first boot device set to scsi in the bios?

Nasty

I've recently switched cables after the problem started occurring.

If I go to device manager and ask it to scan for new disk drives, have to do this twice actually but then, yes, the drive does show up and work correctly in XP, every time. I.E. This works every time.

Which is what makes me think that there some discoverey service not running properly.

If you think it might be a Windows service that has been disabled, try this site:

http://snakefoot.fateback.com/tweak/winnt/services.html

Start with the "Easy" configuration. You can compare and see if any services you have disabled should be re-enabled to automatic or manual, as opposed to disabled.