Using XP pro, I have a second hard (ide) drive in my computer (already formatted FAT32 when it was used in Win98SE and has lots of data on it (I still can boot off this drive to use Win98), When boot up in XP pro using my main drive,: refer the Disk Management tool in Administrator tools, XP sees this second drive and calls it healthy and Active, but the only option is to delete partition (ie I cant but want to assign a letter to it , and also I cannot actually access this disk in normal ways eg.. via My Computer to read or write files (there it cannot be seen, only my main drive is there (drive c)? Note ...If I boot from this win98se drive that XP wont give a drive letter to, I have no probs and can read write to both drives as expected (both FAT32 format). Note booted in XP via computer management, storage, disks..Also, when right click on the disk icon I get the option of "convert to dynamic disk". Does anyone know if converting to dynamic disk will allow me to assign a letter to the drive? Thanks in advance. Ray

Did you try importing foreign disk via Disk Management?

On the 98 hdd are you using Norton's Getdata back or similar program that might be changing the partition type when 98 is booted ? If you have a floppy drive, boot using a 98 start up floppy and run fdisk and check what it says about partition type. Do not boot 98 on hdd and use its fdisk, it will not tell me what I'm after. 'Does anyone know if converting to dynamic disk will allow me to assign a letter to the drive?' Do not do it.

As Top Farmer advised, DO NOT convert to dynamic disk. Among the problems that would create you would no longer have access to that drive in Win98 as Win98 doesn't support dynamic disks. Without system specs it is hard to know what is going on. I'll take a guess. If the hard drive is larger than 127GB and your computer is not 48 bit LBA compliant you may have installed a drive overlay when you configured the drive. That would account for the bahavior you observe.

Thanks for the prompt 3 replies so far. Yes I am using GetBack v3 on the Windows boot disk (ie the problem one for XP) so yes I will check this and other suggestions by you all and will let you know result. But yes...I think all have you have answered at least one question for me relating to this, and hopefully I will solve this problem which was very intriguing for me! And I thought all I had to do was format both drives in FAT32. Fat chance when dealing with windows! Thank you all for your very helpful suggestions. Ray

I'm not sure but I think GetBack uses a special boot code in the MBR and changes the partition type. To check use fdisk from a boot floppy and from booting to 98's hdd and see it partition type is the same.