Some of you may remember a week or so ago I asked about getting Windows 7 to recognize an IDE slave that wasn't showing up. Went into disk management and assigned it a drive letter and it started working fine. Well, now suddenly Windows 7 has decided the drive doesn't exist. It won't show up in disk management, won't show up in the BIOS, nothing. And it was working just fine. I can't figure out why it would suddenly just dissapear like that, and google has been less then forthcoming. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Maybe the mobo is crapping out

Man, I hope not. The thought has crossed my mind. If it is this is the only symptom so far though.

Edit: I don't know if this is related or not, but when my Dad upgraded from XP professional to 7, he was having these problems so he decided to reinstall Windows 7, without formatting the drive. So he's got two versions of Windows 7 on his computer and everytime you boot up it asks which one you want to use. Only the second one is all messed up and gives you an error message everytime you try to use it. Not only that but I can't figure out where its installed on his hard drive. Nothing shows up when I open it up in my computer. Who knows what problems thats causing. I'm probably gonna have to format the stupid drive and reinstall everything.

Could just go back to XP, A computer that still uses IDE isn't going to get much more out of 7 then XP.

Yes it will.

Especially since his problem has nothing to do with Windows, if you'd bothered to read.

The other Windows install either a) probably isn't mounted as a drive letter b) is in a different directory on C:\ or c) is the same exact directory but the boot options are different/wrong.

As for your drive, check your cables, and boot from a Linux LiveCD to see if Linux can see and mount the drive.

If it doesn't show up in BIOS, it's not going to show up anywhere else. Does anyone actually read? >.>

if you can't get it to show up in the bios, and you still want to use the machine, just get an external enclosure for the drive.

might want to test it in something else first and make sure it's not the drive

as MZZT said... double check your cables (IDE cable and power cable) running to the drive. It's entirely possible they have come loose, which would cause the drive to not post in the BIOS. If those are all correct, double check your jumpers. (I doubt there's a problem here, since they were fine last week, but as a last resort, double check it. Who knows, maybe the jumper fell out somehow.) If neither of those solve your problem, then the drive's probably shot.

[and if it's not posting in the BIOS, a Linux Live cd isn't going to help at all. (i think? someone confirm pls?) so don't waste your time.]

whip your slaves harder when they don't work

I would take the questionable hard drive and put it in another computer. Then I would take another IDE hard drive and put it in the questionable computer. And see what works

As for it asking which windows installation to use, you can easily modify the boot.ini with the command prompt, just google it. They do it differently in windows 7 than windows XP.