Why did reformatted C: and reinstalling Win98SE corrupt 2nd hard d

"Jeff Richards" wrote in message
...
The OP is not aware of the installation of the drive overlay because it
was
done so long ago and has been invisible since then, except perhaps for a
small message at startup about booting from floppy. If he knew about it he
wouldn't need to ask for help here. You don't need that confirmation from
the OP to know that is the problem - you only need to look properly at the
description provided - a system that was working OK, a rebuild of the boot
drive and now a secondary drive with one large (apparently) unpartitioned
area and a small unformatted DOS partition. It is an exact description of
a
missing overlay.

Any work to recover files from that drive that does not involve
reinstating
the overlay is going to be dangerous. A typical scenario is that about
80%
of the files look recoverable, which may tempt OP into doing the recover,
when the data would be 100% recoverable with the simple installation of
the
overlay. However I have also seen conditions where 100% of the files are
reported as recoverable because the track layout happened to match the FAT
size, but of course when the recovery is attempted only about 80% are
actually intact.

OP has just re-built the boot drive. Therefore, once the data is
recovered
he can simply rebuild it again to get rid of the overlay.

The drive IS recognised by the BIOS, as originally stated "My computer
recognizes the former D drive...".

Formatting the drive would not have removed the overlay, but booting from
another device and running Windows setup would - OP has not stated exactly
how he installed Windows.

I strongly recommend that you connect directly to the MS server to avoid
missing parts of conversations due to a flaky server.


You have some very good insights and I agree that the problem the OP has
*could* be due to an overlay...but there is no where he states that the
drive had one.

If you are still around Doug, this could be settled by just looking at the
message
on the screen as the machine boots up.
It will say something like EZ Bios.. then specify which key to hit to boot
from floppy
(I forgot the exact wording.) If the machine has that message now...
or if it had such a message before and no longer has it...then indeed it
looks like an overlay problem.


Again, there is no definite evidence of such an overlay...
and there are other reasons why the second drive is unreadable.
It could be something as simple as a loose IDE cable.
The OP might have run fdisk and deleted the drive, then recreated it in
error
and not formatted it. etc

As far as data recovery goes...I cited the case of a non-detected drive
merely as a hopeless scenario...
which this is not. Also as I said earlier...data recovery operations do not
destroy data which are on a drive...
it's more a matter of whether the data are recovered or not.

Again...the existence of a drive overlay was never answered by the OP
when you had asked that question.


BTW: As flakey as my own news-server may be at times...
I can see more messages on it than if I use the Microsoft server directly.
I have no clue as to why...so I often use whichever seems to be working best
at the time.