Well, I'm out of ideas so figured I'd ask here. Dealing with a computer that has 2 IDE hard drives installed, 2 internal optical drives, and 1 Seagate 200 gigabyte SATA hard drive installed. All drives work and show up correctly except for the Seagate. The Seagate in question shows up properly in the BIOS and also shows up in device manager. However, it's not listed at all in My Computer/Explorer *or* in Disk Management. What could be causing this funky behavior? It's not a RAID drive so in the SATA options in the BIOS it's setup for IDE compatibility. This drive did initially work but apparently quit in the middle of a session in using it. Any ideas on this one folks? Would greatly appreciate it.

Interesting to note that Partition Magic *does* show the drive as a Dynamic Disk and it is formatted to NTFS...

Editing again, no it's not formatted to NTFS, it's acting like the disk is locked and that partition can't be deleted or formatted. This is really wierd.

I had a Seagate SATA that would just randomly disappear in the middle of a Windows session. I got it back after reboot (it was always in the BIOS) and then it would go again. I changed the SATA cable and really cleaned the connection and the problem went away. This seems to be a regular problem; I read a few posts with the same.

You could also go to Computer Management and start from scratch and repartition.

Problem is it wouldn't show up in Computer Management and I couldn't do anything with it in partition magic either. The fix? Well, load the good old reliable 98 boot disk and sure enough it showed up as a NON-DOS partition in FDISK. Deleted the partition, restarted the computer back to XP, Partition Magic saw it properly, created 2 new NTFS Partitions off of it and it shows up properly in My Computer once again. Took awhile but finally got it fixed up, I have no idea how it got turned into a "Dynamic DisK" and from my understanding is once a drive gets converted to that it's a one-way street and it can not be converted back. Anyway, now I'm rambling but thanks chas - this drive hadn't worked for a month before this and now it's functioning again so I feel pretty good about that much.

Thanks for the tips to how you solved your problems. I have always been leary of dynamic discs. This will help if I ever run into this. BTW, would you assume that a total new install from the XP disc would have worked?

I think it would have. I don't think I would've even had to reinstall XP the whole way - just enough to get into the partitioning section to delete that partition and then reboot back to Windows to partition and format it. I'm not sure what happened to that drive but I'm guessing is that whenever it was setup initially it was setup as 1 big drive as a logical partition. Then something converted it to a dynamic disk. This time when I set it up myself I made sure to split it into basically 2 92 gigabyte partitions or however it worked out and made one primary and one logical. At least that is my assumption, I bet it'll run problem free now without any worries.

This is my dad's computer by the way and I have known him (even though he is very knowledge hardware wise about computers and not so much software wise...) to make misclicks before that caused this funky behaviour. I bet he was deleting something on the drive and misclicked somewhere telling XP to make it a dynamic disk. I'll have to play later with mine to see where you find the options for dynamic disk setup in XP but I'm soon off to an interview so don't have time right at the moment.