Hey There I'm a musician, NOT a computer expert by any stretch so trying to fix this current problem of mine makes my tiny brain hurt. I'd really appreciate someone taking me by the hand with this one. In February, a couple of weeks after installing a second hard drive (a 200 gig jobbie) my world came a-tumbling down when my system crashed in what appeared to be an irretrievable fashion. A friend of a friend who is a tech for Microsoft advised me that a reinstall of the OS(which is on the first drive) was in order which I did and all ran smoothly for a week or two until, one day, on opening the first partition on the new drive I found much of the data replaced by gobbledygook. After a reboot or two chkdsk ran automatically and did its thing, giving me a new FOUND directory full of *.chk files. This was well and good as I figured i could somehow get this data back. However, shortly after, the entire partition went belly up and I lost everything on it. While chkdsk spat out a whole new bunch of *.chk files what resulted was a massive 28 gig of used space on the partition (the partition is only 30 gig or so big). What was visible, however, was only about 4 gig of these chk files and the vast amount of data seemed odd since it originally only had about 6 gig of data saved on it. With fear and trembling i figured something major had gone wrong with the fat table. I ran scandisk which, owing to the limited remaining space on the drive, could not repair everything although some files have been saved. I then bought a copy of GetDataBack which really did no good as the vast majority of files had been cross linked and were ultimately truncated to their 32 kb cluster size. Still at a complete loss I today read an article at the W2K resources section at Microsoft which suggested that things may still be salvagable by deleting everything on the partition and starting over... Its all so very confusing and I need help badly.. Anyone care to save my bacon or at least walk me through the various processes? Oh - perhaps I should also mention that there is a pagefile.sys file there too which seems to get bigger every time i pursue a new course of action... Hmmm He'p me! Please! Many thanks in grateful anticipation

Just to clarify the situation before folks start offering ideas... You have two drives installed; original drive is Master and has W2K installed. You have a new/200Gig drive installed as Slave. How did you go about configuring the Slaved drive and what file format used? What happend to crash the OS installation on the Master drive? Meanwhile... Pagefile can grow and grow if you haven't set limits... http://www.mssqlcity.com/Tips/tipOperSys.htm disccuses this briefly (start of article). Since you have two drives you "can" put the pagefile on the second drive and get some improvement in overall performance for this PC. I would be inclined to configure the Slaved drive to have both Primary and Extended partitions. Make the Primary the home of the pagefile; use balance of drive (Extended partition) for data etc. More on this at: http://web.ukonline.co.uk/cook/Pagefile.htm

Your disk size may be the problem. Look here at this MSKB and check your Email for a TXT file explaining this issue. http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;Q305098#kb1

Dear trvlr Thanks! Okay - one thing at a time; You have two drives installed; original drive is Master and has W2K installed. You have a new/200Gig drive installed as Slave. - Yep, that's right. How did you go about configuring the Slaved drive and what file format used? - I partitioned the new drive using Swissknife 3 and divided it into five new drives; D - being the drive that crashed, G - which now houses mp3s, and various installation/setup files for different music programs I own, H - which is exclusively for sound data I use in my projects, I - which was blank but now houses the truncated files I manage to salvage, and J - which also had some problems and houses a complete copy of the old W2k I had installed because I wanted to see if I could save some bits and pieces from it. What happend to crash the OS installation on the Master drive? - Good question... The horror began after attempting to install a fairly small (10 mb or so) game program a friend loaned me as she thought I needed to 'unwind' (uh-huh).. The installation failed due to a DirectX problem and the next time I attempted to reboot a message came up in dos telling me that there was a problem with the boot.ini file - which evidentally there wasnt. After some help from the aforementioned friend of a friend from Microsoft we managed to get it to boot as far as the log in screen for W2k but it would then have a fit of pique and go right back to rebooting on it's own.. A reinstallation of the OS seemed, at the time, less trouble than pursuing the matter... Okay.. If I've left anything valuable out in the way of information please let me know.. Thanks so far! tonto

Dear Othehill Thanks so much for that information.. I remember when I first attempted to install the drive there was a problem in detecting the correct size and i did in fact download a patch from Microsoft that mostly fixed it. However, as I recall, the total I got still fell short of the 200 gig but I was assured by my retailer that everything would be fine (more fool me I suppose).. i hope I understood the gist of the article properly.. Thanks!