ok this is kind of confusing but im going to try and explain it as clearly as i can.

so first off i have had 2 hdd for about 2 years. one for my os (at the time XP) and one for games. about 2 months ago i got a virus and i wiped my fist hdd (the one with the os on it) and then i just put in my second hdd and i still had all my music and games. the problem was the virus was still there.
so i wiped my first hard drive again and this time i put vista on it. i then tried to use my second hdd but my COMPUTER couldn't find it. so i wiped it and re formatted it to work with vista.
here comes the weird thing. so i can go to my computer and see my two hdd but when i install something to my second hdd it doesn't show up under the start mean-all programs thing. i don't even get shortcuts for them i have to create them. so i currently have two games installed waw and my new  game fallout. sense INSTALLING waw i have always had trouble with it but i could still play it. and now im having trouble with fallout, the game will consistently crash on the same thing (ex. lif i look at the moon at night it crashes.) now i know for a fact its not my graphics card, it can handle the game and it runs fine. i think im having a problem with it not being installed right to the second hdd.
so i guess my question is why is my second hdd screwed up?
thanks for the help


                   JohnIf the crashes are somewhat random then its not due to location of installation and more likely a hardware failure of some kind. If always crashing in the same spot it may be an issue where an object ( file ) is unavailable and give an error message usually, although sometimes it can black screen and then crash back out to the desktop.

I would wipe both drives clean and install games and software to the C: drive and store your music etc on your D: drive ( 2nd hdd ), this way any games that were designed with predetermined mappings to expect data to reside on C: will not have any issues if there is a path issue is installed to any other LETTER other than C:

Splitting your data up in this manner also allows for future REBUILDS without fear for lost data.

Problems can also occur if say you installed a game to D:, then rebuilt drive C: with a clean os, and try to associate the games on D: with the OS at C:, in which registry settings mismatch to support  the game and games wont RUN or will run with issues or they have registry requirements.i still don't understand why things installed to the second drive don't show up in (start menu-all programs.)
so do you think my second hdd is formatted right, because i was using it with xp and now im using it with vista?