Thanks for the reply limerick....the cdrom is master on the secondary ide port...I have an atapi zip drive that is slave on that channel that shows up all the time no problem...cdr is master on primary channel....both hard drives are connected to a maxtor ultraAta 100 controller....The strange thing is if I boot to 98se instead of xp the cdrom drive shows up no problem...has to be an compatibility issue with xp....but I will double check the orientation of the drives later this week...I am off work friday...will put it up on the desk and check it out......one other question....when I setup XP on this machine I did not download any of the latest Via Drivers......should I maybe download the via busmaster driver and see if that helps....thought I read instances where installing either the 4in1s or the busmaster drivers using xp only caused problems....

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