Drive not keeping format information -- WinME

This is a new one to me, very experienced comp user and im stumped on this one.

I recently got a new Seagate 40GB hardrive and fdisk'ed it the following way:

D: 1.8GB Fat16 (primary dos partition)
F: 7.5GB Fat32 (1st logical dos drive) ** NOTE this is the problem partition and recently changed to NTFS as I explain later on.
G: 9.5GB Fat32 (2nd logical dos drive)
H: 9.5GB Fat32 (3rd logical dos drive)
I: 9.3GB Fat32 (4th logical dos drive)

Now this is the 3rd HD i Have installed on this machine, the first 2 are WD's 5-6GB and are on the primary ide controller. The seagate is the master on the secondary along with a CDRW as the secondary slave. The first hard drive (primary master) has drive letters of C and E. The second hard drive (primary slave) is all NTFS and correctly not recognized by windows ME. I have a duel boot configuration winME and NT4.

Now the problem, When booting into ME the drive listed above as F: (1st logical dos drive) loses its formatting information whenever i format it with Fat32. I have ran extensive scandisk on this drive after formatting and have found nothing wrong. I have checked all refernces in all my drives to F: and also in the registry and have found nothing that references this drive letter. The drive letters assigned to this hard drive in the system properties shows as D,G,H,I . After rebooting (into ME or dos) it shows up in explorer always as an unformatted drive, whether or not it was formatted as Fat32 or NTFS just prior to rebooting.

After fdisking this drive about 3 times and reformatting this whole drive again I still cant get ME to treat it correctly. Even formatting that drive as an NTFS drive it still shows up in ME as an unformatted drive F: .

I have ran diagnostic software on this drive and found no problems at all, mainly Seagates Drivewizard. I have even used ptedit to check the drive type that is assigned to that drive and it shows as it should 07 for a NTFS volume (after I formatted it to NTFS that is).

Sure I could just use the trick of making F: not show in explorer but that is not what I'm after. There is a problem somewhere and I want to resolve it, not hide it.

Now this was my CDRW (it is now using J: ) drives letter at one point, so I figured that this somehow is making this happen, by some kind of cross reference, but that was ruled out or so i think, when I checked the HD's and the ME registry and found no references to F: at all.

Any suggestions will be helpfull.

Greg

 

A WAG: Boot your ME into Safe Mode and check Device Manager to see if your CD-ROM is still listed as F: drive as well as J: drive. If so delete the F: drive listing.

 

yup tried that, it was not listed, but thanks.

Also I had checked if any erroneous hard drive settings where in there that had the drive letter of F, and didnt find any.

BTW the drive was fdisk'ed using support for large hard drives, so the 32gb limit should not apply, that had crossed my mind also.

I amy just have to reinstall ME too get rid of this problem but would like to find out what is wrong first before going that route, as I have alot of software loaded, and it would take forever to reinstall from a fresh install of ME, if that is needed to resolve this.

Greg