Hello all geeks, SHORT VERSION Windows XP has completely taken possession of one of my hard drives. I have two hard drives, one with a fresh installation of 2k on NTFS among other partitions and file systems, and the other with XP and my main storage partition. When I boot into 2k, the other drive is not accessable. It does not show up with drive letters in windows explorer. Furthermore, when I run the "disk management" program, I can see the XP drive, but it doesn't tell me what kind of file systems are on each of the two partitions. THE PROBLEM: How do I gain access to my files from windows 2k so that I can safely remove XP? LONG VERSION I used to be living happily ever after running Win2k on my machine: Asus BE6-IIv1 P3 800 100 mhz bus slot 1 256 MB SDRAM Ge-Force 256 DDR 32MB 15 GB IBM DJNA ATA-66 60 GB Maxtor ATA-66 . . .until my 15 GB IBM drive failed. This is not a problem since the contents of the 15 GB drive are completely and utterly disposable, containing only operating systems and program files. I keep the all-important archives on my 60 GB drive which has two partitions: 3.9GB NTFS on which XP lives, and a 53.3GB FAT on which all my important junk resides. At the time I had a crashed iteration of win98 SE living on the 3.9 GB partition. I decided to try out XP as my emergency OS until I replaced the 15 giger. I concluded that XP is for the average consumer and I don't like it. It makes my computer slower, and it's just way too helpful. Also I have a digital I/O soundcard (dio 2448) which the drivers really suck in XP. So when I got a replacement drive, a 20 GB WDC, I repartitioned it similarly to the way I had the 15 GB before it, and installed win2k on an NTFS partition. I use XOSL as my boot loader, and booting between 2000 and XP is not a problem, especially since they live on separate drives. Anyway 2000 acts abnormally regarding my ATA-66 controller (onboard HPT 366) and says my hard drives need drivers, and I can't access the partitions of the 60 giger. But the driver for the hpt366 seems to look OK in the device manager. So I disconnected the drives from the ata66 controller and connected them as primary/master-slave on the ata-33 controller. I no longer have a "driver" problem, but I still can't access the 60 GB drive. Both OSes use NTFS. I don't understand why I am having this problem. What to do? What has XP done to my 60 GB drive and how can I safely and benignly undo it without having to do a mass-migration, formatation, and resettlment project? I'm afraid to simply wipe out the XP partition because my data on the other partition may be forever unreachable. Thanks in advance for your interest and suggestions. Peace, Dan

WAY too much info. I got a little lost about halfway through it. Offhand I'd make sure you don't just have too many primary partitions. I think the limit is 4 primaries.......

not sure if it's related.. but there doesn't seem to be any official WinXP drivers for the hpt366 onboard the be6-II... so the drivers you are using are probably for win9x or win2k.. may or may not be an issue