[jh3463]

I hope this is the correct place to post this. Soory for the length.

For years I have had an 80GB Western digital HD as my primary drive and a 40GB Wwestern digital HD as my slave drive. Although the slave drive had Win 98SE installed, I was able to access the slave drive without a problem. I decided to have a HD dedicated to Video Editing so, I recently place my origional HD into an enclosure to share a bay/mount with another 80 GB Western Digital in the same brand enclosure (to use as the editing HD). I still have the 40GB Western Digital HD as the slave. The video editing HD has Windows XP Home with it's own CD Key. The primary HD that shares the enclosure bay and has the origional Windows XP Home with the orgional CD Key.

After installing the OS on the Vid Edit HD, I am able to access the slave drive (which always had and still retained the drive letter (D:). When I shut down the computer and replace the Vid Edit HD with the origional HD, everything appears to boot correctly, but I am unable to access the slave drive. There is no drive letter. I went to the Disk Mgmnt tool and the slave drive is recognized as (no drive letter) Disk 1 as the [volume] JOHNS40GB, [layout] Partition, [type] Basic, [File System] Fat32, [Status] Healthy (active), [capacity] 37.26GB, [free space] 14.91, [%free] 40%, [fault tolerance] no, [overhead] 0%. All of this appears to be normal and is the same as when the Vid Edit HD is booted-up (except there is the (D:) in front of JOHNS40GB).

I began having this problem after my oldest kid insalled the Google Earth program. It has since been uninstalled. I tried the simple right click onto the JOHNS40GB but the only option I'm given is to delete partition. Obviously the problem is with this Windows XP and not the slave drive. Is there any way of forcing the computer to recognized the slave as a specific drive? I'm afraid of losing the information from the 80gb or the 40GB. Any help is appreciated.

Thanks John