Slave HDD No Longer Appears

I have added an IBM 80-GB slave hard drive to my rig and it doesn't show anywhere: not on the XP or Me partitions, nor in the BIOS.

I have had this same setup with these drives before, working fine. The only difference is that this time the slave HDD already has stuff on it I really need to keep, instead of being "blank". These are media files that are too big for CDs.

The BIOS HDD detection setup is set to auto, and I restored all setup defaults.
The primary HDD is at the end of the 80-wire IDE ribbon, and the slave is in the middle.
They are jumpered correctly, master and slave, and the power connections are in good and tight.

I have tried resetting the BIOS jumper on the mainboard.
I have also tried disconnecting the slave HDD, restarting the PC a couple of times, and then reconnecting it and restarting to see if it was detected. No dice.
Just for fun, I booted with a win98 floppy. I couldn't find it in there, either.

I can't use my Ghost partition backup, because that is the drive it is on. :)

Besides, I don't think restoring a Windows partition would help, as the BIOS doesn't see the drive.

Any suggestions?

You said you had booth of these drives hooked up to this computer before and they were both recognized?

Does one of the jumpers need CABLE SELECT? What motherboard is it???

The mobo is an Intel D850GB

billmanhart, You stated that you have had this setup with these drives before,do you mean in this current mobo? or have you replaced the mobo? is the drive new to the computer and if so what EIDE port have you selected? Sounds pretty simple but I have had that very problem with a CD drive not being recognized in a new mobo, the Eide ports I had selected were not activated yet and were designed for a hard drive, this of course was a differant board, but something simple might just do the trick for you, good luck.
http://www.intel.com/support/motherb...esktop/d850gb/

I'm sure you've been here already but just in case....
WOW, I just noticed your 700 posts, shamefully all 48 of mine are , me begging for help, goodluck.

Your input is always welcome, fire-It_1. We are all students. I sure as hell am.

No hardware changes at all. It just "doesn't work" anymore. :)

Can you try the hard drive in question in a differant computer as a slave to see if theres a problem with the device?And if it works it might just be a way to LAN over your files.

That's a good thought for getting access to the files.

This is embarassing!

Just in case, I checked the jumpers again.

Imagine my shock when I discovered that sometime in the past (I don't know when) international cyber terrorist agents must have sneaked into my house and changed the jumpers on the slave drive from slave (correct) to cable select (wrong).

The jumper is now changed back to "slave" and the drive is recognized again.

Okay, I know, all together now -- DUHHHHH!!!! :D