Hi all,

Here's the problem, which is strange to say the least.  I installed a
new hard drive (a 3.2gig Maxtor).  I put it as the Secondary Master and
my cd-rom drive as the secondary slave.  (I already have 2 drives on the
primary ide.)  So, I boot up, autodetect it in the bios no problem.
Boot into win95, go into a dos window and run fdisk.  I tell it yes to
activate the fat32 stuff, change to disk 3.  (The new one)  And then
created a primary dos partition of the full disk size.  No problems with
that at all.  Close fdisk, close the dos window, and reboot.

When I reboot, the new drive shows up as drive E:  I got back in a dos
window and format E:  No problems, it's formatted and shows up in
windows explorer and is accessible.  So, I copy several files over to
it, roughly a gig of downloads and stuff.  I notice that my zip drive is
not showing up, so I reboot now.  When windows boots back up, the zip
drive appears as drive E:, and my new hard drive AND my cd-rom have
dissapeared.  I notice in the device manager that it says my secondary
ide controller isn't working properly (Has a yellow exclamation on it.)

At this point, I suspected tha the zip drive was conflicting with the
drive somehow, so I delete the zip tools, and try to find the drivers
for it to delete.  I finally settle on removing it in the device manager
and disconnecting the zip drive from my scsi card.

I reboot, still no hard drive or cd-rom.  I try going into command
prompt only, still no dice, go into safe mode, nothing.  ALl this time,
fdisk can SEE the drive, showing it as a "non-dos" partition of the full
size of the the drive, with no volume label (I named it Drive3 when I
finished the format.)

So, not knowing what else to try, I download the newest Intel Ide bus
drivers and install them.  After this, the cd-rom came back, and I can
see the new hard drive in the device manager.  The secondary ide bus is
functing correctly now also.  But, the new drive is STILL inacessible,
and fdisk reports it as a "non-dos" partition.

Any ideas out there?  I really need this data back if at all possible,
it's not critical stuff, but it's important to me.  I didn't use a
third-party disk utility to format the drive, I used windows' format and
I partitioned it with fdisk and rebooted between the partitioning and
formatting.

I've run out of ideas, sure hope someone knows something I can do to get
this data back! :)  Thanks in advance, and sorry so long, wanted to make
sure everyone knows what I've done so far. :)

Kevin