Bios won't detect 2nd harddrive

I have 2 harddrives connect to my mobo, the primary one which boots windows XP is SATAII and the second one is SATA. The bios and Windows used to be able to detect my 2nd and I was able to use it for a few weeks but now they don't detect it at all. If I reset my CMOS then I can get the BIOS(ver. 1305) to detect the 2nd harddrave as slave. But once Windows boots and I go into My Computer to look for the 2nd drive, it isn't there anymore?? From there, if I restart the computer and go into the bios, the 2nd drive isn't detected anymore. What is going on? Any advice on how to fix?

mobo: asus p5w dh deluxe
cpu: e660:
ram: corsair ddr800 2gb

Sound like a potential drive failure. Have you tried a different data cable, or hooking it to a different connector? Have you changed any overclocking settings recently? Are both drives on the same controller?

-Rav

SATA slave???

Neur0mancer said:

SATA slave???

Click to expand...

lol, impossible!

Sometimes when you have an SATAII hard drive, it won't work with an SATA drive unless you have both at the slower speed(SATA)... when I had this problem I set my main HDD to SATA instead of SATAII, then restarted, then went back into the BIOS and just used the "detect drives" option.

It worked... but my mainboard supports SATA2, mabe it can't support 2 speeds... mabe the BIOS sucks... oh well, I can't detect any difference in the speed of the interfaces with my hard drives... big slow buggers...