OS change and Hard Drive Problems

My computer's Windows XP OS recently "crashed" so I put in a new hard drive with Windows ME OS. I've installed everything with the replacement hard drive, but for some reason I can't get it to recognize my other hard drives that have information written from the XP OS. The only way I have found to get my old hard drives to work is to reformat them, but that requires deleteing the information on the drives- something I absolutely cannot do. Is there any way I can get these to work with the new OS?
The 2 extra hard drives are a 160GB Western Digital
and a 120GB Maxor (formerly my boot-up drive)

Help with this is greatly appreciated!

WyldStallyn

Newbie Poster

2 posts since Feb 2005

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7 Years Ago

The other drives are not being recognised because they will be formatted as NTFS partitions, rather than as FAT32 partitions which Windows Me uses. The Windows 9x versions do not have the capability to use NTFS partitions.

To enable them to be used without formatting, you will need to install a 3rd party software utility which adds that capability to your version of Windows. There are free utilities available which allow Windows Me to READ an NTFS partition, but to get full read/write capability you will have to pay for the software, I'm afraid.

Here's the most widely used one:

http://www.purenetworking.net/Products/NTFSfor98/NTFSfor98.htm

Catweazle

Grandad

Team Colleague

4,335 posts since Mar 2004

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