Look in
Control Panel => Administrative Tools => Computer Management => Disk Management
See if the DVD is there but with the wrong or no drive letter assigned.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Look in
Control Panel => Administrative Tools => Computer Management => Disk Management
See if the DVD is there but with the wrong or no drive letter assigned.

No it's not there at all.

I haven't had this happen for years so I'm a bit rusty as to the fixes.

Try this.
Power down.
Disconnect the drive.
Boot all the way into XP (with no DVD drive)
Power down again.
Reconnect the drive.
Boot into XP again.
If it doesn't find the new device then try the "Find New Hardware" wizard.
.

If that doesn't work I remember something about a registry edit for High and Low filters....
But I don't remember enough about it to be a guide for that.
Other members or google I guess.

I tried both of those solutions. It is not a hardware detection issue because both the BIOS and Win7 show it fine. Something in XP is failing to detect all of a sudden. When I tried the registry thing, there were no upper and lower entries at all.

Now XP can't see my second disk drive either. I believe I caused that to happen myself by unplugging the Win7 drive, so that I could get my drive letters in order and not in some weird order, mixed with my 7 partitions. That served its purpose but upon reconnecting the power, now all the 7 partitions are gone as well. 7 is fine still and shows both hard drives and the cd drive.

Seems XP just forgets anything when it gets unplugged? I tried re-scanning both in device manager and disk management but they seem to be completely gone. I believe any fix would involve XP acknowledging the second disk and dvd drive as being present, which it is refusing to do now.

Gahhhrrrlic wrote:

I tried both of those solutions. It is not a hardware detection issue because both the BIOS and Win7 show it fine. Something in XP is failing to detect all of a sudden. When I tried the registry thing, there were no upper and lower entries at all.

If it's as you said and completely missing in XP then XP has not detected it.

When XP starts up it scans the system for PnP devices and installs the appropriate drivers (from it's drivers library) for whatever it finds.

Your XP installation is screwing that up. Probably some corrupted DLLs or maybe INFs.
I would reinstall or run a repair on XP.

Another possibility is bad sectors on your XP partition.
Check the drive itself.

OK... update:

I went into BIOS and changed from AHCI + LEGACY IDE to just IDE and now XP is seeing everything, DVD and drives. This would normally not surprise me except for the fact that everything was working before with AHCI and IDE.

Perhaps, changing everything to IDE forced XP to see all the Win7 drives under a different host controller structure. Maybe if I switch back to dual mode everything will remain detected...

Ahhh shit. Everything is gone when I switch back.

Now I have to put up with IDE limitations on my win7 machine

Of course you could find your controller chip's AHCI driver for XP.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Of you could find your controller chip's AHCI driver for XP.

Hmm.. now that's a though. Let me see if I can find anything on that.

Oh btw, just to document another failed solution, switching sata ports does nothing.

Maybe it has ejectile dysfunction.

oeuvre wrote:

Maybe it has ejectile dysfunction.

🤣