Hello,
I am new here so hello!
My folks had a major problem with their computer so they got another one and they want me to get some stuff off of their old drive. There was a problem in windows and the thing wouldn't boot up. I have an older system with 98SE on it with 2 drives in it so I just took out their drive (which was their main C drive) and swapped it out with my drive in my tower (which was my slave D drive). Their drive came up but it is labelled as the recovery partition and is the usual 6-8gb although it is an 80gb drive. And I can only access files in the recovery partition. So for some reason only the recovery partition is all that is being shown. I'm pretty sure they had XP or possibly ME. Is there something to alter in msconfig or my bios to get it to recognize the main partition of this drive?

Thanks,
Shawn

Hello Zibon, Welcome to PCHF.

Your going about this all wrong! If you want to access that disk, you should do it from a machine running XP or later, and not from an old version of Windows.

Why?

Windows XP is likely to be using a file system called NTFS.

Windows 98 uses a file system called FAT32.

NTFS and FAT32 are very different from each other. Windows 98 can only read FAT32 patitions. Windows XP can read both NTFS and FAT32 partitions.

For more understanding on the differences between file systems (FAT16, FAT32 and NTFS), take a look at the following articles:

Microsoft File Systems
File Systems Unravelled: FAT16, FAT32, NTFS
Smart Computing Article - Windows File Systems=

I thought it was that. I couldn't remember if they used the same or different file sysytems. So there's no way to get 98 to see the primary partition? I thought maybe there was something I could do to get it to see one or the other. If not, I'll try to find an XP machine I can hook up to.

Thanks again

Not if you want to retrieve the data from the drive. The best way to retrieve the data from the drive is to use it on XP or later. You can use that drive if you wanted to at a later date by formatting the drive as FAT32.

EDIT: Marked as answered.