Ok - so I got a phone call from a family friend here a little over a week ago requesting some tech support.  I stop by to take a look at the PC, and it's in a state that's not worth fixing.  It's an older Gateway PC running Win98, and it won't boot to Windows - just sticks at the Gateway GoBack screen.

So, I convince the friend that it's time for a new PC, and proceed to order the parts & pieces to build them a nice new Athlon64 / Windows XP Pro / Office 2003 PC.

So, I'm installing the new PC tonight - and slave the old HD into the new PC to pull across what data I can.  I boot into Windows XP, and discover that I can't access the drive.  Mind you, it shows up in Disk Management, but it won't let me assign a drive letter, or do anything besides format - which I obviously don't want to do.

So, I throw a question out to the gang (the SBS MVPs are the best tech support resource a guy could have - primarily because we're all scarred & jaded after countless 'Been There, Done That - what a pain in the neck!' experiences.  Well, Handy Andy comes to the rescue and confirms my suspicions that it has something to do with GoBack.  Basically, GoBack changes the partition type to it's own type 44 - which Windows doesn't recognize and thus won't access.  Andy suggested booting to the old drive, pressing the Space Bar when prompted to access GoBack and disable it.  Then boot into Windows on the old drive & uninstall GoBack.  That's fine & dandy - but if you remember correctly, I can't get past the GoBack screen on the old HD - I can't even get into the GoBack menu to disable it, let alone boot to Windows 98 & uninstall.  So now what?

Ah ha - Google to the rescue  :^)

You can fix this without having to boot to the old drive.  What you need to do is to get yourself a partition editor uitlity.  Luckily, PowerQuest had their PTEdit utility.  Now, Symantec recently purchased PowerQuest, but I was surprised to find out that you can still download PowerQuest's free utilities from this Symantec FTP site:

ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/tools/pq/utilities/ 

So, I downloaded the ptedit.zip, extracted it an ran it.  I selected the drive I wanted, then clicked 'Change Type' button to change the partition type from the GoBack type 44 to Fat32 (type 0B).  I saved the changes to disk, rebooted and Voila! I have full access to the old drive.