can't view drive (dual boot)

I just set up my computer for a dual boot winXP-winME system using bootmagic.

When I first installed XP, I was able to see the ME drive (D:\) from XP drive (C:\) just fine, which is very important since I want to copy material from the ME drive to the XP drive.

I *THINK* that after I first installed bootmagic, I could still see the ME drive, but I'm not 100% sure of that.

Either way, I can no longer find the drive from XP. From my understanding of bootmagic, it should NOT be hiding any drives when you are running on the default C: system (at least this is how it has worked for me in the past).

Any ideas on what I can do to view the ME drive from XP?

I've never used Boot Magic myself, but this article might be of help, it seems to suggest that FAT32 partitions are hidden:

http://www.powerquest.com/support/primus/id3464.cfm

I don't think that suggests FAT partitions are hidden.

What it says is that you can't install bootmagic on an NTFS partition. What I did to get around this was that when I partitioned my XP drive, I left a 17 GB FAT32 partition at the end for file storage. Then I installed bootmagic to this partition.

I can view the 17 GB FAT32 partition just fine, and the dual boot also works just fine.

One possible issue is that I didn't do step 16-20 ("Override Default Selections") from that link. I have no idea what that means though, so I'm not about to do it until I have a reason :)

I figured out why the drive is being hidden - its related to that "Override Default Selections" option. What it does is allow you to choose what partitions are visible to your OS (and my winME drive is currently hidden). However there is this warning:

Quote:

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By default, Bootmagic automatically makes the partitions needed by this OS visible. If you choose to override the automatic selections, this OS may not boot correctly and in a few instances may cause data loss.

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I'm tempted to go ahead and do it, but if I can't boot into XP, I'm up the proverbial creek, and losing data is equally bad.

If someone could tell me WHY there is a danger, it would really help. It must have something to do with NTFS and FAT32, because I have set up dual boot systems with all FAT32 partitions and not had this problem.

Which of the OS's did you install first? If you installed XP first, did you "hide" it's partition so you could install ME?

When I used BootMagic the way it worked was to hide all primary partitions except the one you were booting from. If you wanted to share files between OS's you had to have at least one other partition that was logical, not primary. Then you had to store the files you wanted to share on the logical partition.

To answer your question, the ME system came with my PC originally. I got a second hard drive and put XP on that. BUT, I swapped the hard drives when I installed the new one to made the new XP drive C:\ and the ME drive D:\ (which strikes me as a DAMN good idea looking back on it). I then installed bootmagic from the new XP system. Both systems are on primary partitions of separate hard drives, and bootmagic hid them from each other.

I made an educated guess that nothing bad would happen if I let XP see the ME drive, so I made the change.

It seems to have worked out great, with me being able to see the ME drive from XP and transfer files directly. Both systems boot just fine and if there are any adverse affects, I don't see them.

So problem solved. :)