I have a home LAN with two XP Pro computers and one Win98se machine. I recently added a fourth machine which had been running a 10gig Win98se master with a 120gig slave drive partitioned D, E, and F, 40 gigs each. I removed the 10gig master drive with Win98se and replaced it with a new 40gig drive with the slave still connected. I then installed WinXP Pro to the 40gig master, but found that it had been assigned drive letter G. Everything seemed to be working fine nonetheless, but………………, my win 98se machine cannot access the new XP Pro unit in spite of the unit appearing on the Win98se network neighborhood and being able to successfully ping the XP unit from the Win98se computer. The Win98se machine accesses the other two WinXP Pro units just fine, and all WinXP Pro units access each other fine. The new XP Pro unit can also access the Win98se machine fine, but not the other way ‘round. Also, I tried the following on the new machine: Changing: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe to this: %SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /n, /e, /select, C:\ to access Explorer more quickly. It worked on the other two XP machines, but does not on the new XP install, even when changing C: to G:. Are these anomalies the result of not having disconnected the slave drive before installing XP on the new machine? If so, is there a fix, or must I reinstall WinXP to the new machine with the slave disconnected. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

I don't think your networking issues are caused by the OS being on G:. That said, there are some issues with having the OS on anything other than C:. You can't reassign the drive letter on the boot/OS partition. I suggest if you are so inclined that you re-install to the C: partition. Then you do not want to dual boot Win98/XP? If you do then re-install the Win98 drive. If not then you need to choose which drive to boot to in the BIOS. Some BIOSes will only allow you to boot to a drive on the Primary channel. That would be HDD0 in the BIOS. Must be jumpered as the master or be using CS and be cabled on the end of the cable. You can reassign any other drive/partition EXCEPT the boot/OS partition. No need to remove the slave drive unless there is an operating system installed on it. In order for computers to share data they must be using one common protocol and you must be sharing something. TCP/IP usually works for all. Check the Workgroup name too. WinXP default is different than Win98 default.

The workgroup is the same on all machines. All have TCP/IP protocols in place. I find it interesting that the Win98se machine can properly communicate with the two older WinXP Pro machines and not the new one. Equally curious is that the Win98se machine can successfully ping the problem WinXP Pro machine. Is it possible that some service is behaving improperly on the new WinXP Pro machine. Which ones might one check? At any rate, thanks for your input so far.

I'm not really familiar with XP Pro, but isn't there something called 'Simple File Sharing' that has to be enabled?

Win98 is fat32 file system and cannot access ntsf files.

Sorry Per, that's not correct. The network connection is independent of the file system used by the Operating Systems. It just transfers data and each system reads/writes using its own file system.