Greetings all,Having a strange problem on one of my systems. I have a Dell Optiplex 755 with 3 SATA drives, C, E, and F. C is the system drive, and is running XP SP2. Been running this way for a while, and no problems accessing data across all drives.So now, I remove the physical C drive and pop in a new drive onto which I install Windows 7 RTM. Install goes great, all drivers load, and I'm up and running. Interesting thing though, is that after a random amount of time, my E and F drives will disappear and no longer be available. One minute I'll be browsing folders and files, the next minute I'll get an error indicating the file is no longer available because the drive is gone. I've tried messing around with drive letter assignments, and futzed with Disk Manager, but can't seem to get those pesky drives to stick around. I can't seem to find a rhyme or reason as to which drive will poof first; sometimes it's the E, other times the F. And when they fail, they're gone from Disk Manager too.When I put my XP SP2 drive back in, everything is back to normal.Now, I'd understand if they never showed up, that I'd have a drive letter assignment issue, or a BIOS issue maybe. Or maybe even a formatting issue (odd as though that may be). But the fact that they do show up and allow browsing, sometimes for up to 10 minutes, has me stumped.One thing that is different in Disk Manager though. In XP, the C drive is Disk 0, E is Disk 1, F is Disk 2. When I look through Windows 7, E is Disk 0, F is Disk 1 and C is Disk 2. Would that make a difference? Been a while since I've been this deep...I've performed the same procedure on a Vista system and haven't experienced any of these issues. Anyone have any thoughts as to what might be causing this? I've read about the Registry edit to remove the limit keys, but those aren't present in my registry.Any help/advice/direction is greatly appreciated.Thanks all,Myxx Olydian

/bumping this back up. Hopefully someone has an idea, since after nearly a full day of troubleshooting I've still got nothing...

Did you install Windows 7 on the harddrive and plug in it? If it is the case, I recommend plugging in the harddrive first and then do a Clean Install of Win7. In addition, the disk number won't affect this issue. :)

Greetings all,Having a strange problem on one of my systems. I have a Dell Optiplex 755 with 3 SATA drives, C, E, and F. C is the system drive, and is running XP SP2. Been running this way for a while, and no problems accessing data across all drives.So now, I remove the physical C drive and pop in a new drive onto which I install Windows 7 RTM. Install goes great, all drivers load, and I'm up and running. Interesting thing though, is that after a random amount of time, my E and F drives will disappear and no longer be available. One minute I'll be browsing folders and files, the next minute I'll get an error indicating the file is no longer available because the drive is gone. I've tried messing around with drive letter assignments, and futzed with Disk Manager, but can't seem to get those pesky drives to stick around. I can't seem to find a rhyme or reason as to which drive will poof first; sometimes it's the E, other times the F. And when they fail, they're gone from Disk Manager too.When I put my XP SP2 drive back in, everything is back to normal.Now, I'd understand if they never showed up, that I'd have a drive letter assignment issue, or a BIOS issue maybe. Or maybe even a formatting issue (odd as though that may be). But the fact that they do show up and allow browsing, sometimes for up to 10 minutes, has me stumped.One thing that is different in Disk Manager though. In XP, the C drive is Disk 0, E is Disk 1, F is Disk 2. When I look through Windows 7, E is Disk 0, F is Disk 1 and C is Disk 2. Would that make a difference? Been a while since I've been this deep...I've performed the same procedure on a Vista system and haven't experienced any of these issues. Anyone have any thoughts as to what might be causing this? I've read about the Registry edit to remove the limit keys, but those aren't present in my registry.Any help/advice/direction is greatly appreciated.Thanks all,Myxx Olydian Myxx - I'm a bit confused here... You say you take drives in and out - and yet they still show up in disk manager? Are you physically removing them or are you just using a boot manager to switch between OS's? Or are you using the BIOS to swap out boot priority?Like you, I've got a triple boot system set up. But I haven't seen any issue like this before. The XP drive didn't show up at the start - primarily because Windows 7 tends to want to hide XP partitions unless you assign a drive letter to them. The drive letter/number shuffle isn't important. I have a similar situation with the drive letter shuffle when I boot into any other OS.

Hi Candice,Yes, I did a clean install on a newly connected hard drive. 1. Power down the computer.2. Remove primary drive running Windows XP3. Install new drive4. Format drive, install Windows 7Everything in Windows 7 works great. And I can browse those other drives (E and F, which hold data and media) for a few minutes, then while I'm browsing them, they poof...

Thanks for the reply Wolfie. The only drive I remove is the C drive, based on whether or not I want to run Windows XP or Windows 7. When I put the XP drive back in, everything works fine and my E and F drives stay up and available continuously. When I power down and swap in the Windows 7 drive, it boots fine, and works normally for up to 10 minutes. During those first 10 minutes, my E and F drives show up just fine in disk manager. Then after that max 10 minute timeframe, they disappear from both disk manager and Explorer. They even retain the correct drive letters for the time they're available, and programs installed to use resources on those drives launch and work fine for that duration as well.

Thanks Derosnec. I'll have to give it a look. Though it would surprise me if somehow the spin down were allowed to happen while I'm browsing the data on those drives...

Myxx - Ok... Seems an awful lot of work to go through. But eh.. It's your system. I'd also check the power supply in your case. Just for grins and giggles. It shouldn't have any effect, but if it's just barely powerful enough to power your system and it's starting to flake out... There may also be an issue with the drive you've got Windows 7 installed on - if it's sucking down more juice than the other drive - that may also be contributing to the problem.