I just installed debian woody on a spare 30gig hard disk I had. Originally my computer had a 120gig with windows 2000 as master, and a 60gig data drive as slave. The other IDE channel has 2 cdroms. I replaced the 120gig with my 30gig and installed debian. I was able to mount the 60gig fine from debian. When I boot the computer with the 30gig drive, both drives are detected on the initial bios screen during bootup before lilo or linux is loaded. However, when I switched back to my 120gig drive with win2000 on it, the 60gig drive is no longer detected in the bios screen (it just reads "NO DISK" for that ide slot). After windows boots, win2000 also can not locate the drive. I thought maybe I had busted the drive somehow, but when I put the 30gig back in (the one with debian on it) the bios detects both drives fine and debian can mount the slave without a problem.

I am boggled. Everything was working fine with the 120gig windows drive and the 60gig data drive running together. Now the 60gig is never detected when the 120gig is the master, but it always gets detected when the 30gig is the master. I didn't change any of the jumper settings on either the 120gig or the 60gig thoughout this whole process. Any suggestions?

probably checking your master/slave jumpers on your drives will help :-)