Why won't my hard-drive show up on my computer, even though it's plugged in?

Question

alright i have 2 hard-drives in my computer, one of them has all of my music, images, and videos. for some reason every once in a while it decides to not show up on my computer, even though it's plugged in. i have no way of knowing when it's finally found my hard-drive and showing it. i have to keep restarting it until it figures it out. but now it's just not coming back, and i've restarted about 5 times. my background image is a picture from that hard-drive, and every other time this has happened my background went blank. right now, it's still there, but my hard-drive isn't. just pointing that out because it's not normal. can anyone help me out here?

Answer 1

The drive with the operating system may be set to single through the jumpers at the back of the drive.  You'll want to check the drive to ensure you have the primary drive (the one with the operating system on it) set to master, and is at the end of the cable (assuming its the IDE cable, the gray and wide cable withe either black connectors or blue and gray connectors).  Make sure the second drive with your music and pictures is set to slave, and is then middle of that cable.  This tells the computer both drives are there and what order they are in to boot right with the operating system.  If both are set to master, this causes problems.  If one is set to single, you usually can't see the other drive.  If cable select (CS) is set on one or both, my experience in the past is the motherboard tries to figure out what order to put them into, and that has lead to problems often for me.

Answer 2

Go to control panel then Add/Remove hardware then install it.

Answer 3

Just a question. Did you remember to set the jumpers on the back of the hard drives one to master (the with the operating system) and the other to slave. Or are they both the same.