help with my hard drive

[roafamily]

friends

i know this is an easy fix but i just cant get it. I have a dell gx-1 machine with a 13 gb ibm deskstar hardrive installed. when i run fdisk, it sees it as drive 1 but no drive letter has been assigned. how can i assign a drive letter.
when i boot the machine, it wants to go into windows 2000 but it bombs out stating it has no c drive

any and all help is appreciated

thanks in advance!

paul

[Bill in SD, CA]

Welcome to TechIMO!!

Did you set an active partition in Fdisk and did you format?

Bill

[John Prophet]

tell us the history of the problem...

is it a new drive in the dell or have you already had it working before?

Did you take the drive from another comp and put it in the dell??

[Bill in SD, CA]

Found this: http://fdisk.radified.com/fdisk_partition.htm

Bill

[roafamily]

gang

thanks for the welcome

here is the story:
i used this drive to create a image using ghost. this was a clean drive so i used it. after creating ym image i put the drive back into the same computer and tried booting it up

i figured it was going to go back to the sys info since i did a sysprep prior

when it comes up it goes into windows 2000 screen but bombs out and states no drive available

using fdsik /status i see the disk 1 with 13 gb but no drive letter has been assigned..how can i assign a drive letter
paul

[John Prophet]

I still dont know that I EXACTLY follow what you did.....I know that sometimes when I mess with ghost that I have to do a 'fdisk /mbr" to get it to boot.

Now that is with w98se...I am not totally sure what it would be with w2000...maybe someone else can chime in...perhaps it would be "fixmbr"? I suppose you might need to download some w2000 boot floppies from www.bootdisk.com

[John Prophet]

you say you are using fdisk....how are you using it? in other words is it a w2000 floppy or a regular w98 type floppy?? We all know that w2000 uses ntfs and w98 uses fat32 usually.....I am thinking the w98 type floppies wont read the ntfs results right etc

[roafamily]

i am getting a inaccessible boot device

[John Prophet]

you didnt change th eposition of the hard drive jumpers when you took it out did you? does the drive show up in the bios?

[roafamily]

i didnt change any jumpers it is on cable select and at the end of the cable
bios sees it as a hard drive on drive 0

thanks