I was formatting a hard drive, and it was set as master. On the same IDE channel, was the main hard drive, but the BIOS did not detect it as it was set as master also, but it was at the end of the IDE cable, and the hard drive I was formatting was on the beginning of the cable. stupid me, since the BIOS did NOT see the main 40GB drive (with Windows Millenium and some extremely important information on it), I ran fdisk and formatted the 2GB drive the BIOS did see. when i set the 2GB drive as slave, and tried to boot off the master 40GB, the WinME boot screen came up but just froze. So i reset the PC and it came up with the Safe Mode menu, I chose Safe Mode and the PC rebooted itself for some reason. I put a startup floppy in it, and when i checked the 40GB drives contents, instead of seeing the normal (My Docs, Program Files, Windows etc) folders, it simply says: Locked So I unplugged it and installed XP on the 2GB drive (the original intent), and when XP was all done, I hooked up the 40GB as slave and booted up. Took forever, and when I finally got Explorer open, it tells me the 40GB drive is not formatted, would I like to format it now? I cannot format this drive yet, i MUST get the data off of it, but I cannot find anything or anyone to tell me what to do to unlock it. I know the data is still there, as DOS tells me the drive is simply locked, and nothing else. WIndows tries to tell me its an unformatted hard drive. HELP! heh, what do I do??? Thanks, and any answers please send them to: cerealkiller@strikeforcecenter.com (checked MS Knowledge Base and nothing came up...)

ok, this is what DOS tells me about the drive when i run a DIR command from a startup disk: Volume in drive D is eal mode dr Volume Serial Number is 07D1-0518 Directory of D:\ Unit num ber 1,634,038,304 11-15-38 2:19p lock Dri ver 678,717,806 01-16-06 4:03a Address: 10-09-19 4:01a 00EEF3 1,160,785,968 01-26-96 1:27p river In fo: 1,936,942,450 9-00-12 2:19p number: 10-08-28 4:01a 00000 0 5 file(s) 5,159.84MB 2 folder(s) 31,956.81MB it shows up EXACTLY as I have written here (the spacing is a bit different as spaces dont translate well to this form)

Locked in DOS is something you put in the autoexec.bat (LOCK D: for example) so you can use commands like undelete on the files there) So I am guessing the locked might refer to some kind of computer security program that safeguards data. if not what you did could only corrupt or delete the files if it did any damage. How would locked describe that? Regardless of how the term "locked drive" was arrived at, Windows ME does not want to load because of corrupt files apparently. So after you check that no password protection or other security programs are involved, the best approach is probably to reinstall Windows ME into itself and hope that most of the applications data is unharmed.

For starters it does not matter where a IDE drive is on the cable, on the end or in the middle! It should be the jumpers on each drive that tell the BIOS which is which. One being the MASTER the other SLAVE. I would remove the socend drive competly and see if your ME drive responds. If not you can recover your files in safe mode if nothing else.