I was formatting a hard drive, and it was set as master. On the same IDE channel, was the main hard drive, but the BIOS did not detect it as it was set as master also, but it was at the end of the IDE cable, and the hard drive I was formatting was on the beginning of the cable.

stupid me, since the BIOS did NOT see the main 40GB drive (with Windows Millenium and some extremely important information on it), I ran fdisk and formatted the 2GB drive the BIOS did see.

when i set the 2GB drive as slave, and tried to boot off the master 40GB, the WinME boot screen came up but just froze. So i reset the PC and it came up with the Safe Mode menu, I chose Safe Mode and the PC rebooted itself for some reason.

I put a startup floppy in it, and when i checked the 40GB drives contents, instead of seeing the normal (My Docs, Program Files, Windows etc) folders, it simply says: Locked

So I unplugged it and installed XP on the 2GB drive (the original intent), and when XP was all done, I hooked up the 40GB as slave and booted up. Took forever, and when I finally got Explorer open, it tells me the 40GB drive is not formatted, would I like to format it now?

I cannot format this drive yet, i MUST get the data off of it, but I cannot find anything or anyone to tell me what to do to unlock it. I know the data is still there, as DOS tells me the drive is simply locked, and nothing else. WIndows tries to tell me its an unformatted hard drive.

HELP! heh, what do I do???

Thanks, and any answers please send them to:

cerealkiller@strikeforcecenter.com

(checked MS Knowledge Base and nothing came up...)

ok, this is what DOS tells me about the drive when i run a DIR command from a startup disk:

Volume in drive D is eal mode dr
Volume Serial Number is 07D1-0518
Directory of D:\

Unit num ber 1,634,038,304 11-15-38 2:19p
lock Dri ver 678,717,806 01-16-06 4:03a
Address: 10-09-19 4:01a

00EEF3
1,160,785,968 01-26-96 1:27p

river In fo: 1,936,942,450 9-00-12 2:19p
number: 10-08-28 4:01a

00000

0

5 file(s) 5,159.84MB
2 folder(s) 31,956.81MB

it shows up EXACTLY as I have written here (the spacing is a bit different as spaces dont translate well to this form)

Dunno about the being locked thing but have you tried rightclicking that drive in windows explorer and chooseing "explore" instead of double clicking it.