Resolved Lost disk drive

I have an XP Pro machine the works great. I need it cause I'd have to spend over 1K to upgrade all the software. I've been using the same configuration for several years with no problem. The other day, while booting up, I got a real quick flash of a message that went too fast to read. When it finished booting, my one disk drive didn't show up. Rebooted and same thing without the message. The drive shows up in bios, it shows up during the boot sequence, and it shows up,with no problem, in device manager. It does not show up on my desktop. This is a sata 1 terabyte drive and has worked for years.
Today I picked up a new drive and get the same problem - drive is everywhere except the desktop. I tried switching cables and replacing cables with no luck. With sata there are no jumpers to worry about. I tried safe mode and get the same results. I'm missing something, but don't know what.

My systen is: Win XP Pro, 4 core AMD chip, 8 gig memory. Disk drives all sata; Drives c and d partitioned on the same drive, also have drives F and G, and dvd burners E and H. Missing drive should be I. So I have 4 physical disk drives, one with two partitions, and 2 dvd burners. There are 6 sata connectors on the mother board, so no doubling up.

 

Do you mean My Computer icon?

 

Not sure what you mean here. When I open my computer, it shows three disk drives and 2 burners, but does not show the 4th disk drive.

 

Thanks Arie, I have printed the instructions out and will work on it later this morning.

 

You don't see My Computer on later OS's. Hence my question which is what you were doing. We've moved quite a bit since XP and most of us are into the Anniversary version of W10. Take care with your ventures on the Internet with XP.

 

Arie, I think I did with the computer management tool. Over 30 years of playing with computer, I have never run into this problem. Usually when I install a new drive, it automatically picks up the next letter Just for the heck of it, I tried the original again and it's not there. I think it's dead. The good part is it's a WD black which carries a 5 year warranty, and I even have the box and receipt.

Learner, I use the XP machine for a small business, so it's very seldom on the net. If I need something, I download it onto my Win10 machine and use my network to transfer it. The machine and I are in the same boat - getting older, but still working.

 

Update on my drive problem. My new drive is now working fine. I tried the same thing with the old drive and it didn't work. Before I junked it I figured to give it one more shot. I put it in my Win10 machine and did the same disk management thing. It was harder to find but when I did, It listed one drive as "foreign ". A little research told me that when you put an XP drive into a Win 10 system, it is foreign. I had to "import" the foreign and make it native, which I did and I could read all my files on the Win10 machine. I put it back in the XP machine and it was listed as foreign again. I imported the foreign and made it native and all my files showed up. I had to re-boot to finish the install and I got an error message, then the computer ran scandisc and found bad sectors. I replaced one drive with my new drive and was able to copy all 490 gigs of info to the new drive. A lot of work and all new to me, but I'm back in business. I don't trust the old drive if it has bad sectors, so I may keep it just for extreme emergencies. Thanks for the help guys.