What makes you happy ?

Installed XP into a partition. Created 2 more partitions on the same drive.
All looked good.
Powered down. Changed USB card, cleaned inside
Powered up.
And the main drive - the boot drive - has gone. Completely gone.

XP boots. I see the Owner logon. Click Ok. Full blue screen. Then the Windows login music, then the logout music then it gets back to the Owner logon.

If I get in using recovery I see the C: drive - which is the second drive. I can’t move out of that HD.
The BIOS sees two drives.

Open machine up. There are 2 HD’s. Of the cables going in/out there are a set identical but for 1 orange cable. Master? Switch and power up. Nothing, same as above happens.

I can’t reinstall Windows onto the second drive - the only one it sees - as that is my archive drive - and even if I could where did the first one go?

I have no idea where Windows thinks it has gone or how to convince it that it has returned.

Edit: Windows loads to a point then stops. So it must be loading that from the original HD. It then uses that information and part of that must be that the drive it looks at does not exist. So that’s a registry error? But how to get there?
The one drive it seems is not both as 1 large drive. There is no /windows folder.
The only option I have - so far - is to install into the HD it does see. Then boot from that and fix things later. And that risks data loss which isn’t crucial but would be annoying. Still, time for work…

Edit2: The main HD is the bottom one. I remove the connector (has 4 coloured wires going into it) from the top drive. Use a system rescue cd and it sees that disc. It sees the partitions I created. I tell it to make the * partition to a Primary. It says to reboot, I do. And still Windows (booting from the XP CD) says there is no HD. But there is.

Edit3: The BIOS sees no drives. The IDE Config screen has:
OnBoard SATA Controller: Auto
SATA Operation Mode: RAID
OnBoard SATAII Controller: Auto
SATAII Operation Mode: SATA
SATAII Driving: Normal
The CD and DVD drives are listed. Nothing else is detected.
Cables are all good, nothing undo, nothing lose.
I’m running out of variables here……..

Edit4: It’s dead. Nothing I do, nothing default values do and no amount of cable checking gets any life to either drive.

So……. proper recovery time. Go buy an external SATA case, plug in the drive with the archived material on. Then further think about what I can do next.

Edit5:
Systemrescue CD sees both drives. It has made the first partition a primary which I wanted.
ctrl-a enters the RAID setup. It lists both drives correctly.
The Setup menus from pressing F2 show NO drives. No matter what, no drives.
So it’s not a Windows error.
I have removed closed pins 2-3 on the jumpers next to the cmos battery. That reset the internal clock so it worked.
So why doesn’t it work?
(This is not frustration now, hasn’t been for a while. It’s a puzzle. A damn hard one too)

Edit6: (at 2am)
It’s not jumpers.
I removed the USB card.
I checked seating of everything, I’ve googled error 0075 and nothing applies. And it doesn’t apply because all was good. And it doesn’t apply because the cd can see them.

How about I post photos and someone take a look? :)