Computer can't recognise more than 4 IDE devices.

[confus-ed]

Yeah it's possible, but WHY???....pappy?????

'cos he has 7 drives & loads of stuff !!??

All IDE controllers can only generally handle four IDE devices, they are 'almost all' dual channel controllers & ide channels have two devices - ergo 4 IDE devices per controller

If you want to access more concurrently you use an additional contoller

We do however seem to making 'very hard work' of this question !

I pressume that this was a working beast with '9x' on it ... then we 'upgraded' to xp & now its 'broke' ? & we never touched anything inside ???

(& yeah there is only 4 IDE 'type' devices mentioned)

Stuff that worked 'good' with 9x needent work the same with xp - xp requires acpi compliance & pci sharing 2.1 to work 'correctly' - check the xp HCL (hardware compatability list - I seem to say that a lot lately ...)