my pc has two removable ide slots that alow the hard drive to be taken out (drawers) without opening the system's chassi. I have been running win 98 for some time on this machine. A 12 gig hard drive (c:drive) and a 120 gig hard drive (d: drive). I run norton ghost so the 12 gig drive has a 7 gig partition with an image of c drive. This partition is not visible when running windows ussually. I wanted to upgrade to win2000 but was unsure my system could handle it or if i would be stuck in a driver nightmare. So i took an older drive (4gigs) and slide it in the place of the 12 gig drive, making it my new c drive for testing my computer's ability to run win 2000. Not wanting to mess anything up on my 120 gig D: drive, i took that out. I then installed win2000 and found it installed like a breeze , though i had to find some drivers etc. Some of the drivers i needed were on my former d drive (120 gig) so I asked a techie i ran into if i could just slide the drive in and go to disk manager. He said the most important thing is that i did not format anything. Win2000 saw the drive but would not let me access it. I figured i needed to "activate" it, so i selected the 7 gig partition that was showing in disk manager in win 2000, and selected make partition active. I have sense found out that in doing so i told the operating system i wanted that partion to be the boot sector. Well it had no effect on my ability to read the drive under the win 200 os. So I replaced the 4 gig hard drive with the original 12 gig drive with win 98 (1st edition) on it. While the drive shows up in my computer, it will not let me access it. What i want most is to not loose any of the data i have on the 120 gig drive. I need the data accessible. What did i do to make it unaccessible? Can i unactivate the partition? What can i do so I can read the 120 gig drive again, either in win98 or win 2000 without loosing any of my data? any help would be appreciated. thanks David

It's likely that Win 2000 changed this to an NTFS partitioned drive. You may not be able to retrieve this in Win 98 and will have to read in Win 2000 if this is the case.

Hello David, Hard to give you any help information on that particular case... I am surprised you didn't backup on a CDrom theses vitales files or partition, when you move from windows 98 to 2000 ? I think the best would be to bring your tower to a techie in order to save this partition in a new folder reconized by your Win 2000, you need a second computer to do it....

By activation a partition, you are telling the system that "this is the partition to boot to on the hard drive". Where there an error message when you tried to access the drive? If so, what *exactly* did it say?

when i slide in the 98 hard drive and boot up, then go to d drive (the 120 gig drive) and double click on i the message i get is: "d:| drive is not accesible. the device is not ready" i do not think i converted the drive to ntfs, though i would if the data would remain intact and that it would not require my formating the drive. a friend suggest that i try using fdisk in win 98 to deactivate the partition, however when i went into f disk i was not sure how this is done. It seems as if once you activate a partition you cannot deactivate it. I am not sure if this is good news, but the partition on the 120 gig drive i activated was the norton ghost partion (a 7 gig partition), i did not activate the 111 gig partition. I really appreciate all the help... I feel like I was being so careful and i did something so stupid. I do have 60 gigs of the info backed up, that is as far as i had gotton on cds. Thaank you ..i hope this answered your question epp_b

haveing a active partition on 2nd hdd does not matter, i have 2 hdd with active partition on both. run fdisk say (y) to large disk support. select option(5) change fixed hdds select hdd #2 select option (4) display information what does is list?

when i run fdisk like you say it says: partition (1) status (a) type (non-dos) volume label (blank) mbytes (48927) system (blank) usage (100%) does tha thelp at all??? hope so thank you very much ...all of you...i erally appreciate it