Old XP system can only see boot drive now

[dspear]

My XP-SP3 system has existed for a while, but all of a sudden, it will only see my boot drive (and it's partitions). Other hard drives I plug into various SATA ports are seen fine by BIOS, my alternate (multi-boot) Win, and DVD boot disks, so I think the problem is in XP and not hardware.

My primary Win XP will not see it by My Explorer, Disk Management, other partition programs, Device Manager/Disk Drives (shows driver for boot drive only. No other problems there). I don't see any critical services missing, but maybe there are. Other drives don't show in Safe Mode or Clean Boot Mode. Control Panel/Add Hardware Wizard does show the boot and DVD drive, but not any other disk drivers. It shows a missing "pcouffin device for 32 bit systems" whatever that is, but I couldn't install that driver because the registry isn't configured.

One other symptom is the drive is noisy while shutting down and starting, like unsuccessful searching. Going back to an old install (by Acronis TrueImage -great program) and I see multiple disks normally. But I would rather not do this as I would lose the recent free version of Abbyy Screenshot Reader.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

Hey dspear. There might be some problems with the OS indeed, if you can see them otherwise. Do you remember if you did something (updates, newly installed programs etc.) or something happened out of the ordinary before this issue occurred? Other than that I'd suggest that you try the hard drive/s which are not seen with another computer and backup if you have any doubt that something might be wrong. And run the manufacturer's diagnostic tool to see what's the situation.

Hope that helps.
Boogieman_WD

 

[fzabkar]

@dspear, did you change the settings for the SATA controller(s) in BIOS? For example, did you switch to RAID mode or AHCI mode?

Does your motherboard have more than one type of SATA controller, and are all their drivers present?

BTW, the "pcouffin device" appears to be related to the DVD.

 

[dspear]

The same thing is happening when I attach any of 5 hard drives; none are recognized.

I don't recall doing anything special. It just happened all of a sudden. The last thing I installed was Abbyy Screenshot Reader which looks very useful.

I didn't change anything in BIOS. It is still in IDE mode, not AHCI or RAID - I did check this.

 

[Boogieman_WD]

If you have the option, try the drives with another computer and test them with the manufacturer's diagnostic tool, especially the noisy one.