| XP sometimes doesn't recognize a disk drive
Hello. My PC is a Pentium 4 CPU (2.53 GHz) with 1.00 GB of RAM running Win XP version 2002, SP 1. On the front it has 2 USB ports and one Firewire port. On the back it has 4 USB ports and 6 Firewire ports. I use most of these from time to time - sometimes most of them at once, for various devices, but the most common single device is external drives. If memory serves, I've often had four (maybe five?) externals running at once, plus the two internal hard drives, but sometimes I plug in others, the main purpose being backups, so I'll plug a drive in, copy the latest changes to it, and unplug it.
My problem is that, from time to time, XP doesn't recognize a drive (i.e., it simply thinks it's not there). Believe me, this has nothing to do with me forgetting to plug the drives into the computer or forgetting to turn them on. And it seems to be highly variable. It's been happening for years now, and my memory is fallible, so I can't swear that everyone of these things happened but I'm sure most of them did:
Plug in an extra one, and suddenly XP doesn't recognize one it always did before.
Plug the drive it can't recognize into a different USB or Firewire slot, and now it works.
Unplug one, and now it recognizes one it wasn't recognizing before.
And today - what prompted this note - I'm really getting a strange result: Two external drives, both recognized, and I copy a bunch of folders from one to the other (a brand new one). I look, and the folders all get copied to the target drive but they're all empty! I look back at the source disk drive and the folders I copied are all empty there, too. Perform one of my usual solutions (re-boot, or turn one off, turn both off and one back on, etc., and it turns out that, fortunately, now the folders on my source disk DO have the appropriate files in them. Viewing the target disk with the source disk turned off, and no, the files never got copied although the empty folders are still there.
Later, I manage to get both external hard drives working at the same time, and the files showing up in the source drive folders. However, when I try to drag them to the target drive XP tells me it can't find the files. And sure enough, when I look again, they're not visible.
Is there a limit to how many hard drives can be accessed at once? Do some ports override others even if there's nothing in them? As it happens, when the above strange things happened, there were only a total of four hard drives up (two internal ones and the two external ones I've just been decribing (both USB, one Maxtor (source) and one newly purchased Iomega (target).
Please help!
Peyton
P.S. The above may sound like a virus, but this PC has never been to the internet in its life. (The data on it are too important to me.) It's true, though, that from time to time I will copy over a file from my internet PC to this one using a ZIP drive. The internet PC is always updated with the latest antivirus software. | 
