HDD Mystery

I got two HDDs, one has 160GBs and the other 250GBs. Both are bi-partitioned (50-50) and for some reason, Windows 2000 ordered them as follow:

Disk1_Vol1 as C
Disk2_Vol1 as D
Disk1_Vol2 as E
Disk2_Vol2 as F

Drive E holds the Windows 2000 system files and is of NTFS format while all others are FAT32.

My problem is that Windows 2000 is screwing up Drive F; it reports the correct disc comsuption, but all files are on the root folder can't be read and all folders are empty.

If I boot the computer in Windows 98 SE mode, it doesn't even "see" Drive F.

Could this be because there's a NTFS-formatted drive before the FAT32 one? And is there a way to recover my files or there's no salvation short of formatting Drive F to NTFS (which will erase all files)?

>> 10 and all previous ...

Fortunately, my speculation was correct. I switched the HDD out to another computer and voila, worked like usual. So I transferred all critical files and reformatted it to NTFS.

Turns out my hypothesis about Windows (2000, 98SE and XP) not being able to read a FAT32 partition past a NTFS one was correct.

I'll archive this case for future reference, just in case ... Thanks everyone! Thanks 4chan!