Mike M said in :

Sorry to get back after a few days but it's been a lot of work to
recover my system.

Rather than using BootMagic have a look at BootItNG
(http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/). One rather nice feature is that
it can be installed onto its own micro partition - basically the
otherwise unused part of the first cylinder. The advantage of this
being that you aren't then tied to having BootMagic installed on one
of your system partitions.

I wouldn't be without PartitionMagic. It includes BootMagic. I would
have to spend another $35 to get Bootit NG. If I need to to multiboot
then there will be a FAT32 partition available to install BootMagic
since the only time I need to multiboot is between a 95-based version of
Windows, like Windows ME, and an NT-based version of Windows, like
Windows XP. If I ever have need of multiple NT-based Windows installed,
like Windows 2000 and Windows XP, but without any instances of 95-based
Windows, a minimally sized DOS partition for BootMagic would work.

Returning to your problem. In all honesty I don't know why you are
seeing this zero byte drive D: but the clue has to be that the Device
Manager is reporting just the single drive and assigning it as D:
rather than the expected C:. What happens if you boot into Safe Mode
delete the hard drive and all controllers and anything else connected
to the controllers. On rebooting back into Normal Mode where the
devices will be redetected do you still see the same drive letter
assignments?

Turns out it was a partition recovery that didn't quite work right. I
had saved the MBR (sector 0) in preparation to installing Windows ME
since I knew Windows ME would screw up the MBR (see
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=293089). However, I think that only
occurs if you use Microsoft's dual-boot in which you install Windows
9x/ME into the same partition as where is the boot sector for Windows
2000/XP. I created a new primary partition for Windows ME and would use
BootMagic to swap between Windows XP and Windows ME. I had to steal
away 10GB from the primary partition for Windows XP to make room for a
primary partition for Windows ME. I completed the install of Windows ME
but figured it would replace the bootstrap code in the MBR, so I
restored the MBR. That was my mistake!

I had saved a copy of the MBR before I had resized the primary partition
to make room for another one. I forgot to also save a copy of the MBR
*after* I had resized and created a new partition. So my restore of the
MBR included the prior copy of the partition table which obviously
didn't include changes made for the resize and new partition. DOH! To
recover, I resized the primary partition and recreated the 2nd primary
partition just like before. Windows ME booted just fine. This should
work because deleting a partition does nothing to erase the sectors used
by that partition - except I forgot the boot sector gets wiped. Why
Windows ME would start with a corrupted boot sector seems strange indeed
but it did start and work okay. The partition type was correct
([hidden] FAT32) but way too many of its values were screwy. I used
PTEDIT (on the PartitionMagic rescue diskettes) and PTEDIT32 (included
in the hard drive install of PartitionMagic) to look at the partition
table. That looked okay. It has an option to let you review the values
in the boot sector for each primary partition. The Windows XP partition
looked okay. However, the boot sector for the Windows ME partition had
some really odd values, like eight double-dotted "o" characters (has 2
dots above the "o") for the partition OEM name, a garbled mess for the
volume ID, 256 copies of the FAT (when there are only 2), and lots of
other values that didn't make sense. This was why the zero-byte D:
drive was showing up. This is why running DiskImage 2002 from a
bootable floppy on this partition ended up with a zero-sized image.
This is why AIDA32 reported this partition as unformatted although
Windows ME was booting and applications would run.

I couldn't use DriveImage 2002 to save a disk image. It would save a
zero-sized image which was useless. I created a disaster recovery tape
backup using Backup Exec (from Veritas who sold it to Stomp and is now
called Backup MyPC) but it is an old version 4 which apparently has
version 1.0 of their DR (disaster recovery) wizard which screws up in
creating the bootable floppies but the tape backup was okay - sort of.
I deleted the partition, recreated it, and this time formatted it as
FAT32 before using it to ensure the partition table was accurate and to
get a valid boot sector. I then did a basic install of Windows ME,
installed the backup software, and tried to do a restore from the backup
tape. After 3 hours, it had restored only 363 files out of over 14,000
of them. At that rate, it would take 5 days to do the restore. Why it
was so slow is unknown other than it appeared to be looking for a file
at a time and making the tape move all over to find the file rather than
just restore them in whatever order they appeared on the tape. It only
takes an full evening to install Windows ME, all applications and games,
do the updates, and tweak it.

If I had remembered to do an MBR backup *after* resizing the primary
partition and creating another one, none of this work would've been
needed. Also, it appears I could've just used the Windows XP install CD
to use Repair to go into Recovery Console mode to use FIXMBR to restore
the bootstrap program in the MBR after installing Windows ME. Windows
9x/ME screws up the boot sector for Windows NT/2000/XP but only if you
use Microsoft's dual-boot where you install both within the same
partition.