Windows XP wont read my 2nd HD.. FAT12? Partition Error?

Hi Everyone,

Hope someone can help me.. im desperate :-)

Ive had a "series of unfortunate events" happen that resulted in my 2nd Hard Disk (160 Gig with 2 partitions) being inaccessible by WinXP.

In the course of trying to hookup a laptop HD to my PC using an IDE converter, I switched cables around, booted in an old Win 98 DOS Disk, etc. Thats when the problems started.

To make a long story short, turned out I got a PARITY_BOOT Virus (probably from the old Dos Boot Disk) which affects MBRs.

Now, Primary drive works fine (it used to have Boot problems bec of the virus) but WinXP is having problems when the 2nd drive is connected... Chkdsk says its "Not a Win-XP Disk" and have "error in writing Log". WinXP boots but its sluggish and it doesnt show the 2 partition drives of the 2nd drive. (when I disconnect the drive, WinXP boots fine and is not sluggish)

Booting in a (clean) DOS Disk, I can access the 2nd drives 2 partitions.. I browsed thru the contents using a Dos-Based Image viewer and many files are ok but I encountered some errors.

I downloaded several DOS-Based Drive software to test...

Used Seagate Sea Tools (my drive is a Seagate), short and long scans show NO ERRORs.

Used DIYDatarecovery's DiskPatch (trial) to do a "Repair Partition".. scans showed NO ERRORS (but it has ITEMS FOUND... not sure if this means it found something to fix?)

VIEWED The disk info, and instead of just 2 partitions that i had, it shows 3. (Im sorry i wasnt able to list down the exact info but it was something like this)
Name Size
1 FAT12 0 GIG
2 FAT32 Diskname_1 60 GIG
3 FAT32 Diskname_2 100 GIG

So Im wondering, why I have a FAT12 partition? (I think its sector 0 or the boot sector).. is this whats causing WinXP problems to read it?

Can someone pls kindly give me advice to fix or repair this, is there a free tool out there that could do this? Hopefully the good news is that the data is all intact, WinXP just cant access them, (but DOS can.. somehwat)

I havent tried taking it out and using another PC to see if it can be seen as a slave disk... would it? or would it be the same?

Thanks for listening.. hope someone can help . :-)

Just an update...

Used TESTDISK to recover/rebuild the MBR of the Seagate 160GIG drive... now windows can boot properly with the drive connected. It can now alse see one of the partitions. (that drive has 2 partitions- DATA_60 and DATA_100) It can see the DATA_60 but not the DATA_100.

I then used Active@ Partition Recovery... scans show FOUR versions of the DATA_100 partition...

#1 Local Disk
#2 DATA_100
#3 no_name_disk_vol_2
#4 DATA_100

I selected a partition that I was able to browse the files of the missing drive (#1 and #3 dont show the files, just the directories)
I did RECOVER, Active now shows the recovered drive..

But back in Windows, Explorer shows the drive named as "Local Disk", but cant browse it...

I deleted the partition and started over again... same thing happened.

Meanwhile, a DOS boot still shows all the proper drives (thankfully)
Active can detect and (apparently) restore the Partition.. and as far as Active seems to be concerned, it was successful (you can browse the files within Active)

But Windows still cant.

Im stumped. I tried everything I can think of. I'm kinda afraid of messing with it further... I might inadverdently corrupt it further and might lose the data even in DOS....

Im thinking of copying the files from DOS but i dont have a spare hard disk to accomodate almost 100 Gigs of data.. and the long file names show up as short names in DOS so it might mess up the file structures...

Can anyone offer me advice on what to do next?

Thanks so much...