[hen90]

I have an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ processor running Windows XP Pro with 512 Mb of RAM. I have a 120Gb primary drive, an internal 80Gb second hard drive which was taken from an old PC, is partitioned and still has XP installed on one partition, and an external 160Gb hard drive.

I have made no changes to my system but all of a sudden the secondary drive has disappeared from Explorer, Disk Management and Device Manager in Windows. I have checked in the BIOS and the drive exists and also have booted through the secondary drive into the old version of XP without issue so the hardware seems to be fine. As no physical changes were made to the set up, the only thing I can think it could be would be a software change such as Windows Update or virus. I have run a Norton virus check and the system is clean.

I have searched through forums for the last couple of days for a similar problem but not found a solution just workarounds of the type reinstall windows which is not practical for me.

I'd appreciate any direction or suggestions of what could have caused this and ways to move forward