Can't access slave drive after clean install win98SE on master

I moved important docs & pix to physical Maxtor drive before performing a format/install of Windows 98SE on my Western Digital master drive. Now I cannot access D: (Maxtor) drive where these files are located. Also at boot, neither master nor boot appear on the black scrolling screen, but windows starts up. Going to My Computer and double clicking on D: only gives message Drive is inaccessable. Hitting F8 at boot and going to Command Prompt only and then trying to switch to D: gives me message Invalid drive specification.

How can I get to the data on my D: drive?

Start by putting weatern digital as master on primary ide and Maxtor as Master on secondary. If you haven't changed the jumpers at all this is the way to start. Then go into the bios and make sure the bios is set to Auto detect hard drives. I would then boot and try see the Maxtor. (it does sound like a master slave bios problem) You can also try booting to a floppy and run fdisk to see if it sees both drives and all the partitions. If it still won't detect post some more info like Mobo make.

It seems that we might need more information.

To start, when you copied the files to the Maxtor, how did you do it? What OS did you use? Did you copy them from the WD?

With the message you described, I would almost think that there is a new partition on the drive without being formatted. There is a lot that you have left out. Please try to fill in the blanks, we might still be able to help...if anything, to suggest proper data recovery software.

When you installed 98, did you use Fdisk first? Is it possible that you fdisked both drives? You may want to run fdisk now without changing partition information, to see which file system is being use on the disks, but if 98 was all that was ever used to manipulate these drives, you wouldn’t be dealing with NTFS incompatibility.

Also try setting maxtor as slave and WD as cable select
WD is flaky like that sometimes, thats why i hate them...
Or try setting WD to single drive on the primary ans put the maxtor on the secondary channel, on the setting thats not occupied by the CDrom