Did you use disk management to see if the drive was visible.
Neil
"seth" <me@myhouse.local> wrote in message
news:%23VIsXgR3IHA.4988@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl...
>i have a strange problem with xp and my additional drive i recently bought.
>
> i was running vista for a while and just couldn't deal with it anymore so
> decided to go back to xp.
>
> i have the original 250gb drive and added a 1tb drive. when i installed
> xp it saw the 1tb drive as D and worked fine. i started to install my
> drivers, first with the latest nvidia drivers for my video. it installed
> fine, but after the reboot i nearly freaked out when D was gone. it
> didn't see the drive at all. subsequent reboots did not show the drive in
> device manager at all. i started over again with fresh xp install and
> after it finished D was there again. i installed sp3 and after the
> reboot, D was again gone. i installed xp a third time and D was there.
> this time i did nothing except a reboot and again D was gone.
>
> one thing that's interesting, every time the system would boot after the
> initial install finished and D wouldn't appear, the boot process took
> excessively long (nearly 5 min). i can't make sense of it. if it was a
> matter of xp never seeing the drive, i can see the possibility of a driver
> isse, 48 bit lba support etc. but when the drive can't be seen after the
> second boot following initial install, that doesn't make too much sense to
> me (bios always sees the drive).
>
> i ended up going back to vista (for now) and no issues accessing the 1tb
> drive.
> system is hp pavilion a1630n purchased end of 2006.
>
> any ideas why this could be happening?