On my PC, I have a SATA 80GB internal, and on IDE, a CD reader and a CD writer on one IDE cable, and two caddies for removable drives on the other IDE, which I use for back-ups. I generally only have a disk in one caddy at a time, but I have two caddy-disks and swap them monthly, using the not-fitted one for remote backup.
One of these caddy disks recently reported a SMART failure, so I bought a new disk and fitted (Win XP). At first I could not see the new one on Windows Explorer, though I briefly saw the PC recognising it on POST, and I saw the "found new hardware" dialogue.
I don't often do this (I thought it triggered automatically), but I found Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management, where I did "Rescan Disks" and formatted the disk NTFS, changed Drive letter to "D", set status to "Active" and then it seemed OK.
However, next time I restarted the PC, the new disk was not visible on Windows Explorer. I fumbled through the same steps, but each time I power off, it disappears again.
I now find I can make it appear by starting "Add Hardware," each time I power up, from Control Panel - it does it very quickly, without even asking me what to look for.
however, there is obviously something wrong. My old caddy disk never got lost. And I have not unplugged the caddy or anything (though I did move it from the "Slave" caddy to the Master caddy in case that helped.. it didn't.
I have set the disk jumper to "Master" as I thought Cable Select might be causing the prob (but this did not help), and it is on the end plug of the IDE ribbon cable.
What ideas? Isn't the PC config stored somewhere?
One of these caddy disks recently reported a SMART failure, so I bought a new disk and fitted (Win XP). At first I could not see the new one on Windows Explorer, though I briefly saw the PC recognising it on POST, and I saw the "found new hardware" dialogue.
I don't often do this (I thought it triggered automatically), but I found Control Panel/Administrative Tools/Computer Management/Storage/Disk Management, where I did "Rescan Disks" and formatted the disk NTFS, changed Drive letter to "D", set status to "Active" and then it seemed OK.
However, next time I restarted the PC, the new disk was not visible on Windows Explorer. I fumbled through the same steps, but each time I power off, it disappears again.
I now find I can make it appear by starting "Add Hardware," each time I power up, from Control Panel - it does it very quickly, without even asking me what to look for.
however, there is obviously something wrong. My old caddy disk never got lost. And I have not unplugged the caddy or anything (though I did move it from the "Slave" caddy to the Master caddy in case that helped.. it didn't.
I have set the disk jumper to "Master" as I thought Cable Select might be causing the prob (but this did not help), and it is on the end plug of the IDE ribbon cable.
What ideas? Isn't the PC config stored somewhere?