XP stopped seeing a FAT32 partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter Alan
  • Start date Start date
A

Alan

On this PC, I have a multi-boot setup with Windows XP
Professional and Windows 98SE. I have two 40MB hard
disks, ond DVD-ROM and one DVD±RW drive installed on this
machine. The boot hard disk is setup with one FAT32
primary partition (C:) and one extended partition divided
in two volumes, D: and E:. D: is formatted FAT32 while
E: is formatted NTFS and is the boot volume for XP. 98SE
is booting from C:.

The second hard disk is setup with only one extended DOS
partition, with only one volume (F:) formatted as FAT32.
After about one year, all of a sudden, Windows XP stopped
seeing the extended partition on the second hard disk.
Disk manager and Windows Explorer think the disk is not
formatted. If I boot in Windows 98SE though, the drive
is accessible with all its folder structure and files.
Because in XP that disk was marked as volume F:, now in
Windows 98SE, I'm shown a drive E: and a drive F:, but
they're actually duplicates of the same FAT32 volume on
the second hard disk.

I tried several recovery utilities, like Winternals
Recover NT, but when run from XP, they dont find any
partitions on the second drive. Does anybody has any
idea what's going on, and if there is anything that I can
do in XP, other than reformatting the drive and blowing
up all my files?

Many thanks in advance,

Alan
 
That's great. You got XP to read your Win98 drive for one
year. I've just install XP on a new hardrive and it won't
access my old hardrive (win98-FAT32) at all :-((. XP
thinks my old hardrive must be formatted. How did u
succeed in the first place?
 
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