Disappearing partitions

Can he go to DOS and see these partitions?
Did this user use FDISK to setup this drive or a third party software?

Hi...as a suggestion I would recommend...www.powerquest.com (products) and take a look at partition magic.Should take care of his or her problem.

The best and easy way is to into FDisk on Dos Mode. Got to "start" then "programs" then click on "MS Dos Prompt" When you get to the C:\ prompt you type - fdisk . You sould see a questions asking you regarding if you would like your hard drive to be treated a large drive or not. This is a very important question. It all depends wether you want to have a Fat32 or Fat 16 Allocation table. If you say Yes, when you created your partiton and then format it later on, you'll have a Fat32 partition. If you say no, the other way around and you'll get Fat16. If you're using windows 98 I would suggest say yes at the prompt. Once you answered the question you'll come across a screen containing 4 or 5 choices depending if you have more than 2 eide drives or not.
What you need to do is put number 4 on at the prompt. This will display all partition information on your computer. All your partions will have a drive letter associated with partition. If you only see one partition which is your c:\ Drive then you need to create the rest of the partitions. Hit esc button and go back to the main menu. Now you have to make a choice wether you want to create a bunch of partions or just one huge single partions. When you choose cohice 1 your will create another partition and then you need to enter the partitions size that you want. Unless you want one big partition size and that's it, you need to keep repeating the steps on choice to finish creating your partition. Once you're done keep hitting esc key until you exit out of the program. You need to reboot your computer. When your computer is up, go to your windows explorer and right click on the drives you created. Click on format and and do the same for the rest of the drives.
It takes a while to learn, but you'll get the experience. Good Luck.

You have some really nice responses here...all of them are worthy. Very important to see if it's 95/98 or if it's the HARD DRIVE itself. If the hard drive is going bad...that your hosed. Check in DOS first to see if you can see the drives...and in FDISK to see if everything is cool.

FIRST THINGS FIRST.... run SCANDISK and see if your FAT TABLES MATCH. Second... is there a VIRUS in the machine...or did your friend visit a BAD WEB SITE that gave the command to NUKE the drive? Check these also.
Latez-

I have seen at some times that Win Explorer will misinterpret or misplace a drive or 2. All is not lost. Try restarting Explorer and the drives may come back. Reboot the pc in dos mode and see if D: E: F: give you and Invalid Drive Specification. If it does, then you have a possible Boot virus. But some of the virus' will erase C:. But run a reputible virus scanner and it should find a boot virus.
If it don't find a virus, then probably the partitions may be hosed. After verifying that the pc is clean from virus', use a good partitioning software (Partition Magic) to see if they are hidden. If not, then you may have to rebuild the partitions.

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