30G WD drive now has no letter

you can also try these
boot to an ME boot disk and type
sys c:
also try fdisk /mbr

Could also be EZ BIOS that ships with so many drives.  You need to boot "minimal configuratio"  I think that's what ME calls a DOS boot or a similar to DOS boot.  Make sure the drive is set as master on primary IDE.  Does it have an Active partition or was backup created while the drive was Extended partition?

I would check the drive is correctly fdisked (set as an active partition) make sure it is formatted with the appropriate file system. I would check out your MASTER BOOT RECORD as well trying running fdisk /mbr

Dang everywhere I  go I hear a very strange echo.  I keep seeing comments by others as well as myself be copied in additional posts.  Must be related to a "newbie" on the site.  Oh, I get it.  Signed up today did you?

What do you mean when you say "backed up computer on 30G drive"???

How did you back up?  Was some OTHER drive the boot drive?

Please explain further.

Thank you all for your comments.  I see I need to add more detail:

* Was the second drive on a win95 (I think) system, and I fdisked it as single extended partition and formatted it, then copied my main (boot) drive onto this second drive.  I was able to use it just fine.  

*The current system is ME.  The Data Lifeguard utilities now show the drive as a fat32 partition, however, fdisk shows it as an active, non-dos partition with 100% usage.

* fdisk /mbr does nothing.  what should it do?

Thanks again for y'alls' help!

fdisk shows it as an active, non-dos partition with 100% usage
non-dos is the problem
try the sys c: command
Yu may have to reformat the system. what did you use to copy the drive? ghost? drive image?

Did the old drive have any disk translation software like ez-bios, or something like that to enable the bios to see larger drives? or did you use any thing like that on the new drive? these can cause this problem. remove them and see if it helps

* I can't "sys" the drive before it's recognized as a drive, and the problem is that is has no letter (see top)

* if by "reformat system" you mean reformat this drive, that defeats the whole purpose of backing up my original boot drive and trying to recover it now.

* The old boot drive needed no disk translation, but ez-bios was installed by Data Lifeguard when the 30G slave was installed.  I've tried to boot mimimal from the recovery disk, but this changes nothing, since ez-bios is no longer installed anyway (cause the boot drive was reformatted).  Is there a way to reinstall ez-bios by itself?

Thanks to everyone again for trying to help.  It's maddening to do everything to fix a problem only to create a worse one.  :Oc

* Data Lifeguard (I assume) did nothing but a file copy from the boot to the slave, but I guess I can't be sure, can I?

data recovery software
http://www.runtime.org/gdb.htm
http://www.ontrack.com/

http://www.hdrdatasoftware.com/

http://www.r-tt.com/

http://www.dtidata.com/

Yikes!  We're to data recovery already, are we?  I was backing up my data...so I could rebuild my system....so I could get it on the network....so I could back it up on CD's.  BACKFIRE! *LOL*  (you MAC users are laughing, I know).  :OC. .. ..  Thanks Steven; I'll look into those links.  Hopefully they (or some other hardware gurus here) will tell me some things that are safe to try (short of reformatting, ya see), that at least MIGHT allow me to recover my drive.  Thanks again.

Do you have partition magic? you could boot to a prtition magic disk and see what it reports, and see if it can fix it

Don't have Partition Magic, but at $70 it seems more economical than getting a full data recovery service to do it (if it ever comes to that).  It also implies there are non-destructive possibilities to try in the boot sector.  I was intimately familiar with the contents of the boot sector as of DOS 5 (it's been a while since I had to get into things at that level, as you can see).  I'm still searching your links and elsewhere to try and fill in the gaps of a my knowledge.  I still think trying the right (non-destructive) options from fdisk should bring the drive/partition back.  I'll let you know how it goes.

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