I run a computer shop and had a problem with the business pc
running W2k.
It froze during web activity. Reboot got the
"inaccessible boot device" error.

I rebooted using the second drive (XP) but it failed
to read the volume.

I took it home and my home pc ( also W2k) failed to read the volume
as did all the various file recovery utilities.

All my drives are FAT32

Hex editors read the volume but will not recover FAT info.

Now for the rub. Booting from my second home drive ( Win ME)
it would read the volume. It always reads the directory structure
but sometimes it fails to retrieve files - claims drive not formatted.

If the drive is powered off for a few minutes all recovers.

I also get the ME blue screen sayinf "unable to write to ...."
whatever the drive letter happens to be.

It seems that for some reason NT based OS will not read
the drive but 98/ME will

Weird !!!!

Any ideas ?

I dont know what the problem could be, but thats one reason I always run NTFS instead of FAT32. NTFS is much more recoverable than FAT32.

Boy is that a statement to rouse the masses!
Dos boot disk gives me access to fat32 but not ntfs. Guess it comes down to what you consider easy recovery.

It appears you have a physical problem with the drive. I would suggest you download the drives utilities from the manufacturers site and run them.

I would also suggest you put the drive back in the original system as master on the secondary ide channel. This will eliminate hd controller/bios's view of the drives geometry from the mix. It will also eliminate any issue with compatablity when dealing with master/slave configuration.