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JeffHPI

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Win98 recognizing primary slave IDE Hard drive at boot but...

I just reinstalled Win98 on a brand new hard.  I had a huge mess when I tried to upgrade Win98 to Win2000!  Many programs wouldn't work, errors all over the place, etc.  I decided to reload win98 but had massive problems getting it done.  A guy at work in the IT dept. told me I ought to just go buy a new hard drive and start over.

A little background on what I had and what I did:

I had a 13 GB hard drive as primary IDE master with the Win98 OS on it.  When that got too full, I went out and bought a Western Digital 40 GB hard drive just for storage purposes as the primary slave. Both were formatted as FAT32 file system.  Everything worked well until I decided to upgrade to Win2000.  I re-formatted my file system to NTFS on the 13 GB primary master but did nothing with the 40 GB primary slave... forgot!  Anyway, one problem was that because the second HD was still FAT32, I couldn't read it!

I bought this new hard drive yesterday, a 40 GB Seagate 100ATA 7200 RPM and with the old secondary 40 GB hard drive unplugged, installed it as the IDE primary master and loaded Win98... no problems.  I then plugged in the secondary (the older Western Digital) hard drive and rebooted.  

well, the BIOS detected both hard drives plus the CDROM reader drive as secondary master and the CDROM burner drive as secondary slave... all ok!  That is until I got Win98 completely re-booted.  I clicked on "My Computer" and the secondary hard drive wasn't listed!  It has C drive as the new prioimary Master Seagate, D drive as the CDROM player and E drive as the CDROM burner.  Before when it was all working under Win98 on the old set up, the 13 GB primary master hard drive was C drive, the 40 GB Western Digital, the primary slave (which still should be) was D drive.  The CDROM player was E drive and the CDROM burner was F drive.  

I did not format the secondary slave 40 GB Western Digital when I reinstalled so it should still be loaded with my stuff and in FAT32 file system.

What do I need to do to get it visible and useable?

THANKS!!!

Jeff
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jvuz
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Can you go to disk manager:

rightclick my computer-manage-disk management and see if the second hard drive is listed.
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jvuz .... Windows 98 doesn't have "disk management"
Jeff ...... click on start button and run then type "command"
now type "fdisk" and see if you have a "5" option ... something like "change disk"
if the disk is recognized by fdisk then check partition's status. My guess is that somewhere on the way you've deleted the part. from your older WD.  In such case I'll paste you list of tools for recovering your data.
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Luc Franken
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JeffHPI

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Wow... didn't figure on this!  OK, LucF, I am downloading PC Inspector's File Recovery program.  When I run that, should my hard drive be visible with all files or will I be bringing them over to the primary master hard drive first and then formatting the primary slave hard drive that hasn't been visible?

I have an all day seminar I have to leave for in a minute so I won't have time until tonight to finish this...

Thanks and if you all think of anything else I need to know, post away!

>>When I run that, should my hard drive be visible with all files or will I be bringing them over to the primary master hard drive first and then formatting the primary slave hard drive that hasn't been visible?<<

The last one, PC Inspector can only recover data, you will have to write the data to another location, afterwards, you will have to repartition and format the second disk and then you can put the data back on that disk.
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Luc, any other choices that might allow me to just recover the entire drive as it was without saving it elsewhere and re-partitioning the second drive?  I'm all about simple! :-)
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kronostm beat me to it ;-) he's right.
I din't beat you, I just set my clock earlier than usual to post before you'll wake up.  ;-)
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OKn the problem I'm having in saving with this software is that I get a box that pops open and says "Error... cannot write to C Drive".  I guess I'll have to contact the writer unless anyone knows why.  I can write to C drive with anything else I do no problem.
Did you slave the harddisk to another computer? If not, you should, otherwise those recovery software has no use.

LucF
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The hard disk I'm trying to recover is the primary slave on this one.  There isn't another computer I can use.  
Strange...
Do you have administrative rights when you run the program?