Hi all!
Two of my HDs out of four are no longer shown in "my computer".
One is connected to ide 2 and the other to the promise ide port 1.
The mobo is an ASUS A7V333.
They used to be shown.
This happened after I uninstalled AstonShell that I wanted to test drive (got rid of it because it does not support dual display).
I made a repair install but the drives still do not show.
At boot-up, the mobo's bios sees all the drives on ide 1/2 and the promise bios sees the other ones on ports 1 and 2.
Fdisk sees all my drives as fit with correct size and as NTFS file system.
The W2k command console does not see the drives.
I tested the two drives in another machine which shows and accesses them without a hitch. I even changed the ide cables to be sure.
No virus was found on the drives.
The drives are connected to two completely independant interfaces (regular ide and promise) so that I cannot believe they just died at the same time!
What has likely happened?
Could it be that W2k does not mount these two drives and why?
Is there a way to get W2K mount them?
Help much welcome.

use disk management under computer manager to import forgien disk

Thanks, will try that tonight when I am in front of the machine but I do not remember to have seen the option "import foreign disk" enabled in Disk Management console.
That would mean W2K does not see the hardware at all.
Maybe time to format and reinstall has come ;(

NTFS disks created on another PC (or installation of windows) need to be imported.

Right click on the foriegn disk, and choose import -- u may need to reactivate it after.

This is NTs way of mounting a partition/disk

FAT32 disks are found straight away and show up as a drive

check if the 2 disks is in dynamic mode and the others in in basic mode.
also check is those disks is made for raid array.

Thanks for answering
Here is a picture of the situation:
- there is no foreign disk that shows to import in the Disk Management console
- refresh and rescan have no visible effect
- first culprit disk shows up in device manager on ide 2 and the hardware type is properly recognised by W2K
- second missing disk hardware identification cannot be seen because it sits on the promise ide 1, I assume
- promise controller runs with Lumberjacker pure ultra dma bios which works OK (no raid array ever built, just plain vanilla ultra-ata ide)
- all four disks are properly seen by mobo bios and promise bios at boot up
- all four disks sit on their own ide channel (no shared channel)
- the missing disks were never set to dynamic
- I have just installed another instance of W2K on another partition in a folder with a different name and the picture is exactly the same on that new install, ie the two disks are still missing
- I log on as administrator, no password ever set, and I have all administration permissions
- the box has been running like a charm for half a year until I uninstalled the AstonShell desktop enhancement app

Well I could format every thing and start from scratch a clean install of the whole box. I will not do it before knowing what is happening.
A nice case for NTFS experts out there! :x

Well, I just browsed all my disks from dos with Readntfs.exe utility.
As expected, they are all there, fit and healthy. No disk and content missing in action. Was able to copy files from missing drives to a fat32 drive hooked as slave on an ide port.
Why does W2k does not see them?????
Hey, all the big nt guys, where are you?
Clutch, Dosfreak, Alecstar and other experts?
Is this forum dead?
I think I have lost ownership of the volumes under W2K. Virus? Trojan?
How to recover ownership of something the os does not even see?
I challenge you guys. Sort this out.
Just for fun

Never mind
Problem solved

Hi Alec!
Nice to "see" you online
What seems to have happened is that those two drives were given and were "remembering" drive letters that were already attributed to other drives.
How did this happen and why? I dunno. Trojan?
Like their drive letters were "hardwired" and therefore hidden by other drives.
I solved the issue by removing all drives but the boot one (C: ) and hooking back all the drives one by one and have the os take them with reboots in-between.
They were recognised by W2K as soon as they were hooked according to the right rank/letter.
Ntfs weirdness and/or security?