Hi Guys, Its been a while sense my last post. I've had plenty of time to get into deep trouble. Well I installed XP PRO over 98SE and everything went down the tubes. An X friend of mine told me to format the c: drive and install XP from DOS.No can do!! So I installed 98SE back on the c: drive and had to find all the drives and upgrades for my programs. Before I formated the hard drive I copy all my data to the g:drive which is my second hard drive. Thought I was safe but when I booted up in 98SE I couldn't find my G: drive. I did a FDISK and found my 2nd drive didn't have a partition. I guess XP did that. What are ny options in getting the drive and data back without spending a ton of money? I trust you guys will have a good answer for me. Thanks for your help in the past and future.

Others will be along to tell you how (and if) you can recover your second drive. I doubt that WinXP did the dirty deed, but I could be wrong about that.

However, I can point out that you can install WinXP directly from the CD. You cannot install it from DOS because it doesn't use DOS as a native format. You don't need to install Win98 first, you just set the BIOS to boot from the CD drive and put the WinXP disk in the drive and boot.... I wouldn't do anything with that however until you get responses about the other drive or you could lose the ability to recover anything....

Your only real hope of easy recovery is when you went to XP you converted the drive to NTFS which cannot be seen by win9X. So if you install XP as Budfred instructed, you should be ok.

If possible, go into the bios and select the 'auto-detect HDD'-
sometimes switching from 98 to xp or back can cause the drive to be incorrectly reported - you should also check to see if boot sector protection is enabled (this is usually under the general section of the bios) - this can cause similar problems (saw it myself on my system last week!)
also, please state if you actually switched to NTFS (this is the default option for windows XP) when you installed XP.

I'll try installing XP again and hope I don't have all the problems I had before,really slow boots and internet connects,sometimes no connection and a host of other unusuall gliches. Wish me luck. See you on the otherside.Thanks to all.

PS.When I install XP should I go with FAT32 or NTFS? If I use FAT32 will I be able to see my 2nd drive?

You cannot install it from DOS because it doesn't use DOS as a native format
Not so. You can install Win2K/XP from DOS or from a network but you dont run set-up to kick-off the installation. Instead you need to navigate to the i386 folder and then run winnt.exe from within the i386 folder.

If I use FAT32 will I be able to see my 2nd drive? You will be able to see either FAT or NTFS partitions from WinXP regardless of whether it is itself installed onto a FAT or NTFS partition - so yes, if the partition is still there, WinXP should see it OK. If the partition itself was deleted then the files should still be recoverable unless they have since been over-written.

BTW - It is just the DOS-based Windows/Win9X OSes etc that cannot "see" NTFS partitions.

You can try GetDataBack (http://www.runtime.org/) to recover any lost data and this should be fine unless you have overwritten stuff on that drive/partition - so write nothing to it until you have first attempted recovery. GetDataBack works very well and you should be able to run it for free to see what is recoverable. You can still copy and paste each recoverable file one by one for free, but would need to buy the app to recover a whole batch of files in a simple manouvre.

Thats the answer I was looking for. Now I can install XP.
Thanks!!