OK to save me a lot of time and to get into this forum fast i will ask my questions directly.

my machine is an hp, 2.0 ghz intel celeron processor. a ton of ram of which i can't remember. it came with a 40gb hard drive and i installed my old 20 gb hard drive in it. it came with win98, and i got a cd for xp pro that is a upgrade cd. i have had to many times either reformat my hard drive or repair it using the Cd's. i had the 20gb hard drive as a backup copy drive to make sure if i messed up the c drive i could get all my data back. so i would unplug the 20gb drive and mess around with the 40gb drive, if i messed it up my backup data was still OK.

now my problem. sometimes i get on a website it could be anywhere and i must get viruses and my computer goes wacky. i have zonelab professional installed avg installed for firewalls and virus protection.but when something goes wrong i just install the win98 cd and reinstall the operating system and then i have to install the xp system afterward. sometimes when i reinstall xp pro it asks me if i want to repair it and i do and all goes well. but last month i had to go through all this again and i did the same procedure as usual, but something went wrong and my c drive became unbootable so i got a sata drive and installed it. well that drive did not work by itself so i got a card for it, then i saw it during boot up, but not in the my computer screen. i checked the drive in the devices page, it is there along with the driver. some friends told me the sata drive would not work as a c drive so i got an ide drive in the 250gb size. i installed that drive and only got 137gb to be shown. good enough for now but when i installed either of the old drives, they are not seen. I'm guessing the fat tables have been erased but i need the data off of them. how do i get them to show so i can get the data? or what software can i get that will work? i have downloaded a ton of software and none of it sees the drives when they are plugged into the computer. i know this is long but it is the only way to save days of mail at first. thanks for anyones ideas. bob p.

There seems to be several problems happening.

There is no valid reasonn to be forced to reinstall XP so often - there must be a hardware problem.

Run a HDD test utility from your drive’s manufacturer to make sure the drive is functionally OK. You can find them all here:
Seagate/Maxtor/Quantum Seagate Technology - Downloads
Western Digital Downloads
Hitachi/IBM Support - Downloads and Utilities
Samsung SAMSUNG's Digital World - Hard Disk Drives | Utilities

There is no reason to have to install '98 before installing XP - unless the XP version is an upgrade version.

XP probably needs the SATA controller driver to be installed during XP Setup in order to be able to see the SATA drive. There is a message "Press F6 to install 3rd party..." which gives you the opportunity to install that driver.

The reason XP sees only 137GB of the big drive is because XP has not been updated to at least SP1. Install SP2 and skip SP1.

Get XP SP2 by any of these ways (Use it for any version of XP):

XP SP2 on CD mailed to you I’m not sure MS is still offering this.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/updates/sp2/cdorder/en_us/default.mspx

Download from MS Site This is a 272MByte file !
http://www.softwarepatch.com/windows/xpsp2.html

MS Developer’s Network-Install Version This version has a different installation method.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=049c9dbe-3b8e-4f30-8245-9e368d3cdb5a&displaylang=en
This is a 272MByte file !



There could be other hardware problems, but start with these tests first.

If ur pc is pikin up the hd and u just cant access them try going to ur administrative tools n see if the drieves show up there if they do and there is an x on them you have to delete them from the admin tools(computer management)),restart ur pc, and see if u can access them then.Most pc wont allow larger than a 137gb drive to b installed on an ide.If ur drive is larger than 137gb,u will need to dl software to enable the rest of ur hd space. i went thru the same probs. hope this helps. also try updating ur firmware on the drives ur havin the access probs with