old hard drive had windows 98 on it. bought a new HD, installed XP, set up
new HD as master drive. now i cannot access files on old HD.

i can see the drive in disk management, but cannot assign drive letter or
much of anything. cables, jumpers, BIOS...everything seems to be set up
correctly.

any ideas? i have combed through MS knowledge base, many newsgroups and none
of the proposed solutions work for me.

thanks

Did the old drive have a drive overlay program on it? If the old drive came
from a computer with an older BIOS it may have a drive overlay program on it
so that the full size of the drive could be accessed. Most commonly this
overlay is from Ontrack software. Many drive manufacturers provide a
specialised version of the Ontrack software for setting up their drives. If
you used the manufacturers disk to setup your drive when you installed
Windows 98 this is likely your problem. You can fix it by setting the drive
as the only drive in the computer, booting from the drive setup disk, and
remove the overlay. I would image the drive with some disk imaging software
first. Removing the overlay usually doesn't cause a problem but there is
always the possibility it will.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...e+Search&meta=

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca


mrsteve0924 wrote:
> old hard drive had windows 98 on it. bought a new HD, installed XP,
> set up new HD as master drive. now i cannot access files on old HD.
>
> i can see the drive in disk management, but cannot assign drive
> letter or much of anything. cables, jumpers, BIOS...everything seems
> to be set up correctly.
>
> any ideas? i have combed through MS knowledge base, many newsgroups
> and none of the proposed solutions work for me.
>
> thanks

Kerry,

the windows 98 was OEM installed, so I am not sure if an overlay program was
used.

any other ideas on how to proceed. thanks

mrsteve0924 wrote:
> Kerry,
>
> the windows 98 was OEM installed, so I am not sure if an overlay
> program was used.
>
> any other ideas on how to proceed. thanks

Reset the drive as the boot drive, boot to Windows 98, and copy the files
you need to a CD/DVD/USB drive. Once you have the data off the drive, reset
the drives back to the current configuration, and boot back into XP and
format it.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca

i guess i could do that. i would still like to know why i cannot view the
drive though.

i guess i have to just let it go.

thanks

mrsteve0924 wrote:
> i guess i could do that. i would still like to know why i cannot
> view the drive though.
>
> i guess i have to just let it go.
>
> thanks

It is probably because it has a non-standard partition table. This could be
because of a drive overlay as I mentioned or an OEM partitioning scheme for
a factory restore procedure.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca

thanks for the help kerry.

You're welcome. Let us know how you make out.

--
Kerry
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User
http://www.vistahelp.ca


mrsteve0924 wrote:
> thanks for the help kerry.