My grandson, 12 years old, has a computer that is divided into a duel boot, by me, and recently things went south. He has been using the d drive for all his uses but recently could not access D because it says that the drive needs to be formatted. For what reason I do not know but from the info from him and his mother it just stopped when they installed a dvd drive, E (the dvd drive works). C drive was inaccessable also but did not need formatting. I reinstalled windows 2000 on C but still could not access D drive. It would be simple to just format D but that is where his music and other things reside and would like to save the files. Question: Is there some way to reach these files short of taking it to a professional? If I have left out any info that would be helpful in resolving this please let me know. Thanks in advance.

First off, do not format that drive. Watch the startup screens at bootup to verify that all drives are being identified by model number. If the drive in question is being identified correctly then it is mechanically OK and jumpered and cabled correctly. If not, then one of the above conditions exists. It sounds like a jumpering/ cabling issue. When using IDE ATA ATAPI drives (the ones with the wide flat data cable) the jumpers on the rear of each drive MUST be set in the correct positions. If two drives reside on one cable one must be jumpered as the master and one the slave. Conversely both can be jumpered as cable select (CS). This is one possible cause of your problem. How new is this computer and what capacity are the harddrives? Reinstalling Win2000 may have created some problems with access if the drives are larger than 127GB and the version of Win2000 you installed dowsn't have at least SP3 integrated on the CD. More information is required in order to fully sort out your problem. As stated at the beginning, DO NOT format. I suggest you download and run SIW.exe. This free utility can yeild the needed additional information about the type and size of all your drives. Find SIW.exe at the link below. Download the standalone version. Information needed is harddrive capacity and type. Two possible types of drives. IDE ATA or SATA. (third unlikely type not addressed here). http://www.gtopala.com/siw-download...

Thanks for answering. This is a single ide Maxtor 20ghz harddrive and is duel booted. All info on startup is correct as to drives. It shows drive c and d for the harddrive. C has 5ghz and d has 15 ghz. At some point when I try to access this drive I get a message: crc error [32] for d drive and at another time I get: drive needs to be formatted. This windows has service pack 4 installed.

Look at the link below. Try running scandisk and possibly chkdsk. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/156571 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/229716