A lightning strike fried my mother boad and I moved the hard drive to another machine about the same vintage. Yea it's kind of old. I was running 98se but now it won't boot to windows but I can access the hard drive. Problem is I am trying to backup files to a slave drive but the new system does not assign a drive letter to the slave drive (2nd hdd). I've tried every jumper setting I could think of and even moved it over to the cdrom ide interfrace and it still doesn't assign a drive. The bios recognizes it but I can not access it without a drive letter assignment. Primary is a 40G WD. 2nd 6 GHD is a fujitsu.

Try it as master on the 2d IDE channel (I assume this is where your CD is connected).

If all you are trying to do is transfer data I suggest using a linux live CD. You maybe able to assign the drive letter using this aswell.

Have you tried manually selecting the drive to boot from?

I know sometimes for various reasons the older win9x stuff had trouble with assignment of drive letters due to bios, virus, esoteric hardware... or, true malfunction... who knows? Sometimes to "fix" it you had to litterally go into device manager and TELL the O/S what letters to assign various pieces. Sometimes you only needed to assign the ONE piece of hardware a letter. Many times, upon reboot, the cd would NOT become the last (new) drive letter, and would retain it's original drive letter, giving the impression you had NO 2nd hard drive, even tho' bios saw it. For instance, you'd go to device manager, under the CD properties (in device manager) you'd CREATE a new drive letter for the CD -- 'E' (or M if you wanted) save/apply the config, reboot, and then the NEW piece of hardware would be assigned to the suddenly "available" drive letter of 'D', instead of both drives struggling to be "d", or preventing the CD from becoming the new E drive... whatever way you looked at the case.

Try using a free partition manager such as-
http://www.partition-tool.com/download.htm