I put a hard drive from a win 95 machine in a win 98 machine as a slave hard drive o nthe primar IDE channel. Windows won't recognize the added drive. Bios finds it with no problem, and windows knows it's there (e.g. it shows up in device manager, but without a drive letter), it just won't access it. I believe the win 95 hard drive is FAT16, and the 98 drive is FAT32. Any ideas as to how I can get the system to access the new (win 95) drive? I would like to get the data off of it. Thanks.

Only reason I can think of, provided you've set the drive's jumper to slave, is that there are no partitions on the drive --- so no drive letter.
Incidentally, Device Manager doesn't show drive letters - that's normal.
You only see drive letters in Windows Explorer/My Computer. Try booting in to pure DOS (not a DOS window), then type FDISK and from the menu choose the option see the partition details for that drive, just to confirm that it does have at least one partition. And while your in DOS, log on to that drive and type DIR to see if DOS can access the drive.

Fdisk from DOS mode:

Partition: 1
Status: A
Type: Non-DOS
Volume Label: (blank)
Mbytes: 1032
System: (blank)
Usage: 100%

It doesn't have a drive letter assigned under DOS either.
The drive functioned perfectly well in another machine underWindows 95 before I put it in this machine. Is it possible it has some sort of drive management software (Western Digital) to allow a large drive under Win 95 that's messing thiings up? Or can the FAT16 vs. FAT 32 be messing things up?

It's possible that it might have fat12 or earlier. If win95 was installed over 3.1 and that was installed over dos, which it has to be, then 98 will have trouble with it. I just had such a drive with that and it had compressed files as well, and win98 couldn't work with it. Even fidsk and format couldn't deal with it. I had to write it to zeros in another machine to resinstall dos and WfW. If you can network the two machines you can probably get your files out. Otherwise if they aren't too large use floppies.

PS: I just rememberd that you may have a file conversion utility.

This post has been edited by Tyger: Sep 21 2005, 02:05 PM