harddrive partitioned, first patition not responding...

[buzzinhornets]

I have win98se on C: (6.4GB drive) then my second drive is (40gb) is partitioned into 6 partitions... the first partition D: has windows XP on it...

I was downloading something over night, woke up, computer froze... restarted, but noticed a clickin sound from my harddrive... windows98se started, but when I start>explore> I cannot view anything from d: says device not responding...

how can d: not work, but e: f: etc work? they are all on the same drive??? what could be that clicking (sounds like its shutting on and off)

are there any utilities help me? from dos? if its fatal, is there anyway to stop d: from recognized? cause it's slowing down my system because some things are linked to d:

in dire need of help

someone told me that it could be a damaged fat32 file system... which could be corrected via a simple format of drive d: ...does this sound reasonable? do I risk losing the info on the other partitions of the same harddrive?

[jeffbond]

I am not an expert but i am sure that you cant have 98,me (Fat32) on the same system as XP (NTFS) because of compatability probs but it will probably depend on what the other partitons on 'D' are formatted to probably NTFS which is not Dos based so you will not be able to see anything on that drive from your Win98.

I hope this is of use.
Reason i think i know a bit is because i wanted to use XP as os but 1 programme would not work on it and after contacting the maker they said they wont be putting out an update so i asked around about partitioning my hard drive with a bit for ME on and the prog but was told the above so i gave up till i bought a German Version of the software which works on XP with english toggle on it.

[buzzinhornets]

no, win98se and winXP worked fine together for over a year... installed 98 on c: first, then Xp on d: and the boot automatically goes to a prompt that asks which OS to launch... pretty standard stuff...

but anyway, back to my harddrive problem... anyone know how to fix it?

[jeex]

i would reccomend turning off your computer for a few hours to let the drive cool down.. restarting, backing up your data, if possible.. then formatting and repartitioning the drive.. if the clicking sound returns, have the drive replaces..

[mrtristan]

Your drive is most likely broken. I just lost a hard drive and it behaved exactly like yours. I had it replaced, under Maxtor's warranty program.

I lost a lot of my mp3's that weren't backed up, as well as other various information, but I did get a larger drive.