darkfyre

hey there guys... I've been doing an overhaul of my computer, and the OS installation has been giving me some problems so far... The biggest thing is that I can no longer access a drive that i partitioned and formatted in win2k a few weeks ago... here's a more specific description of the problem: - A little while ago I put together a computer with one single scsi hard drive, and I installed win2k as the sole operating system on that disk. Everything pretty much went fine there, the setup and install was smooth as ice. - A little while afterwards, I decided to add a second scsi hard disk to my system. This drive was I think both partitioned and formatted entirely within the win2k disk management console. I was pretty impressed by how easy win2k seemed to make managing my disks. By the way, both disks are FAT32. I copied a substantial amount of important personal files onto this second disk of mine, and this data no longer resides anywhere else, so I'm pretty nervous about messing with things at this point. - Just this past weekend, I decided to do an overhaul of my OS setup. I deleted all partitions on my bootup hard disk, and setup 2 new partitions on it, a 5 gig and a 12 gig. I first installed Win98SE on the 5 gig partition. Everything went smooth, no problems here. Now, the first thing that I noticed was that while I was in DOS during installation (I had to boot to dos using a win98 startup disk in order to install the OS itself), DOS wouldn't recognize the partitions on my second disk. Fdisk was say that there were no partitions (I THINK, im not sure about this... the only thing i remember for sure was that fdisk's information did not reflect my actual partition info on that second disk). I think at one point Fdisk indicated that the disk in question had a FAT16 partition, which is impossible because win2k can't create fat16 partitions, right? - Then I installed win2k pro on the second partition of the first hard drive, which is once again a FAT32 partition since I want to share files betweens OSes. Now lo and behold, win2k is no longer able to recognize the partitions that it had just created a few months ago on that second hard disk. Win2k would see the hard disk, but disk management would say that there were no partitions on that drive and that the disk was unformatted. -whats going on here???- - I also found out that Win98 was actually able to recognize that "lost partition" that I was unable to access under win2k. Here is a description of my setup: - 300W Enhance PS (I dont see how it could be even remotely possible that this is causing any problems, but i think the quality of this PS probably rules out the chance of any power-related issues) - 256mb of cas2/pc133 crucial memory (again, memory doesnt look to be an issue) - Asus K7V mobo (perhaps this is significant? I'm not up to date on all the mobo issues, via chipsets and 4 in 1 drivers, stuff like that, so i have no idea) - athlon classic slot 1 700mhz @ 700mhz (no overclocking) - adaptec 29160 scsi card - a pair of cheetah 18xl 18.3 gig ultra160 hard drives - ibm 75gxp 45gig ide hard drive (it was somewhat bothersome getting 98 to install and boot off the scsi drive, but i think it worked out okay. I never got the drive letters sorted out the way i wanted in win2k, though) - hercules 3d prophet II gts 64mb - turtle beach santa cruz, linksys 10/100 nic, pioneer scsi dvd drive, and tdk ide cd writer (but I dont think these have much significance) Any ideas? Comments? Suggestions? I'm TOTALLY stumped on this one, and I would realllly appreciate input from any of you guys. thanks a million in advance. p.s. that's not the end of my problems, either. my win2k installation is, for all intents and purposes, corrupt in some way or another, because whenever I try to install -any- video drivers (any compatible ones that is) for my Hercules 3D Prophet II 64, windows halts on bootup after restarting with an error message that mentioned a page fault and something wrong with "Ntoskrnl.exe". I'm gonna post a separate thread with detailed information hopefully sometime soon, but if you do happen to have any ideas or if this has happened to you before, PLEASE let me know! my email address is darkfyre(at)yahoo.com should anyone wish to contact me directly. I don't want to be selfish though, I think it'd better that replies be posted here so that others can hopefully benefit from the information as well.

no i didnt... i actually was curious about dynamic disks and went on microsoft's knowledge base site to check it out, but figured that it probably wasnt something i wanted to use...