[YeOldePube]

Let me first explain my problem,

I have two hard drives, 50 Gb each, I got Windows ME with my comp, I then installed Fedora Core (Linux) onto the second drive (D) with Windows ME still on the primary drive ©. This worked perfectly with the choice to boot from C drive (Windows ME) or D drive (Linux Fedora Core). But I then tried to install Windows XP on C drive and it all went tits up (wrong). Now after a lot of pissing around I have C drive working with Windows ME installed on it after using the backup disc, but Windows ME sees the second hard drive in device manager but doesn't see it in My Computer. So I am left with a useless second drive which I guess must be formatted in a way Windows ME can't understand. Any help anyone can give would be greatly appreciated because I've been 50 gig down for about 6 months now.

Cheers

Steve

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What happened when you installed XP.What was it doing?

[OneCool]

What happened when you installed XP.What was it doing?

[Samm]

Linux & XP both support dual booting but ME doesn't. Installing ME on the C drive, followed by Linux on the D, is fine because Linux takes control of the boot sector & permits dual boot function.
When you installed XP afterwards, it will have overwritten the boot sector which is probably why it went tits up (even though XP should support this)

Likewise, by replacing XP with ME, ME will have overwritten the boot sector again, and as it doesn't support dual booting, you won't be able to boot Linux any more.

On top of that, Linux doesn't use any file systems that ME can recognise, which is why the Linux drive is inaccessible from ME, in the same way that ME and win9x can't recognise drives formatted using NTFS (XP/2000/NT).

You should be able to reinstall Linux on the D drive, as you did before. This will leave ME intact and recreate the boot sector thereby giving you the choice of booting either OS.

If you don't wish to use Linux anymore, then you can remove the Linux partitions on the D drive using one of several methods :

1. Remove them using an application that recognises Linux file systems (eg Partition magic)

2. Boot from the Linux CD/floppy, and run disk druid (or whichever partitioning utillity your version of linux uses) to delete the partitions

3. Use another 3rd party utility (such as mbrtool) to zero fill the drive. This will return it to it's factory state (ie blank with no partitions etc)