My two primary hard drives are SATA disks I have no problem with. Then I add an old IDE disk (that my BIOS has no problem seeing, by the way) to my box. This disk should show up as /dev/hda, right?

Because it doesn't. What could be the problem here?

If it is a recent kernel, it will be listed as /dev/sda# instead. Mine does, which is version 2.6.22-9.

I thought that was only for SATA disks? Anyway, there's not /dev/sdc... just /dev/sda and /dev/sdb, my SATA disks.

The SATA module libata also supports PATA (IDE) drives. Since libata uses SCSI subsystem modules your IDE would also show up as a sda device.

hda is the 1st controller master drive. How is the drive connected to the computer? Is the BIOS recognizing the drive as such?

The dropping of hdX drives is part of the newer kernels. The process is new enough its behavior is sometimes difficult to predict. On some of the systems I have seen it has replaced (when added to an existing system) sda, in other cases I have seen it skip a few letters sdd. I usually use something like gparted to figure out what the drives are being labeled. Depending on your pata controller support for it may have dropped through the cracks (assuming a unusual controller).

It's connected to its own IDE cable (no switch on the whole master/slave thingamajik). The BIOS recognizes it and I can change the boot sequence of the hard disks there.

(What I'm using this disk for is Windows XP, and really, the only reason why I want to be able to see it is so that I can add it to Grub and select to boot to Windows XP there instead of always having to exchange the boot sequence in the BIOS when I want to boot into Windows.)

Gparted doesn't see my disk, though, just sda and sdb. Is it possible that there's some kind of support in the kernel that I left out that I need for IDE drives to work? (My CDROM and both other hard drives are SATA.)