Sorry for the double post, I posted first in general before I saw the sticky.

Heres the original post:

Hello all,

A little background first..

I have a ABIT AN7 Motherboard and hooked up a new 200gb disk to it a week
ago or so. Worked fine. Then, after a while I forced myself to do a clean
reinstall of the system. Fine. Then at the install I realize I needed my abit cd
with all the nforce drivers on it for the mobo to work perfectly. Installed and
saw to my horror that the 200gb disk was now marked offline/failed etc etc.
No effort of mine could bring it back online, so I lurked up some newer nforce drivers. Installed and presto, disk is now working fine.

HOWEVER.

Now, Windows XP thinks that my NEC ND2500 DVD drive is a "Removable Storage" hard drive. This, is not good. What did I do?
Reformat/reinstall with old nforce drivers gives back the DVD but kills off the availability for the 200GB extra hdd.

Help? I tried emailing ABIT and plenty of other people but the replies are far in between.

Any feedback on this would be greatly appreciated.

will the burner still burn? do the burning programs recognize is correctly?

try Morpheusware Remix Drivers for NForce 2.... you can get them here :http://envynews.com/index.php?ID=626#C

The DVD is not recognized at all by any program, although it shows fine in the POST screen at startup. This is all very confusing, I havent changed any hardware since last time I installed XP.

Well, the only change would be that the new Seagate disk wont show up unless I use the 5.03 nforce drivers from Abit. If I use the original "from-the-cd" nforce drivers that came with the motherboard, the ND2500 is identified and works fine without any hitches. But then the Seagate disk is listed as offline/unreadable/failed.

I'm getting frustrated..
I will try the special nforce drivers though, just maybe it will work.

I reverted back to in-the-box ide drivers and remade the 200gb disk from dynamic to basic partition and now it all works fine. Apparently the IDE-SW drivers fooled xp into thinking the nd2500 was a disk drive. And xp was being a bastard about that dynamic drive without the ide-sw drivers. So back to basic partition. Problem solved!