Hi everyone!

Let me explain things up.

Ever since my pc broke, i have been using an old PCChips motherboard, with a 2.5 gig HD as IDE 0 master, a CD Rom as IDE 1 Master, and a 30 gig HD as IDE 1 Slave.

I had W2K installed on the 2.5 gig HD and used the 30gig HD for data.

Since i had a problem with a game (which was previously posted on the forum), i thought that installing a W98SE would solve the situation. But since the image was downloaded, it wasn't really safe for installing on the main HD, so i thought it would be a better idea to put it in the 30 gig one. So i did it.

I unplugged both disks and put the 30 gig as IDE 0 Master. Configured bios, booted from floppy, and attempted to format the drive. It failed twice. On the third attempt, it did. I started installing 98, but it failed, it said files were missing.

So, i just plugged everything back like i had it. But i was surprised when i started browsing and found out that all the files in the disk that was supposed to have been formatted were really intact. But there was something that was even weirder...

There was another hard drive on my computer, and weird enough, it was a 20 gig one. Thinking it would be an emulation or something, i just tested it by opening it and storing files on it. Surprisingly, it worked. I was able to read from the drive, write, erase, everything.

Believing it must be my computer that is old and cuckoo, i just gave it a try in another computer, and it still was there, with all the files. I was starting to convince myself that it wasn't actually a problem, since out of nowhere i created an extra 20 gig, which was awesome.

Week later, i had forgotten about the whole issue, but when i checked back, files were not there. so i tried it on another computer, and the disk was there, but it showed to have no format, and windows asked me to format it.

Today, i plugged it into another computer, and run some tests. When you format the 30 gig one, both disks work fine. Write, read, erase, everything fine. But you can't format the 20 gig one.

So we decided to unplug everything, just leave a cd rom and the disk, and boot with a win xp cd to check for partitions:



Results were clear, two partitions, one of 20 gigs, and another of 30. So we blew the 20 gig one, and we saw that there was no modification in the disk space. Then we deleted the 30 gig partition:



As you can see, the space shows up as 30 gig, but nothing more. We installed xp pro, but there is no sign of the ghost drive.

So here are the questions:

"WTF JUST HAPPENED HERE???"
"Why?"

If someone knows, i'll be glad to know.

(I thought this was the best place to post this, since i was told it was a hardware issue. If some administrator or moderator believes it should go somewhere else, please excuse me, and i will move it. Thank you)