My wife has an ancient (by tech standards) Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop. She previously had Norton System Works and Norton Internet Security installed on it. After she uninstalled the two programs (using the Norton removal tool), in preparation for adding Kasperski, it would no longer boot.

Unfortunately, I don't recall the error message that was being displayed. I worked on it for quite a while, got frustrated, and put it aside for a couple of months.

It is running Windows XP, Media Center Edition, Version 2002, SP2.

I previously performed the following actions in an attempt to resolve the issue:

1.) Attempted to boot to Safe Mode. No luck.

2.) Attempted to repair the boot file via the restoration disk, supplied by Dell, and by my own XP installation disk. No luck.

3.) Finally, as a last resort, I re-formatted the restoration partition, previously installed by Dell, at the factory, and reloaded the full OS on that partition. After doing so, that also did not appear to resolve the issue, at the time.

Feeling ambitious, this evening, I decided to break out her laptop, again, to see if it could be fixed.

Just for fun, I turned it on to see if it would boot and to note any error messages that may pop up.

Lo and behold, it booted, using the new boot partition I had previously created.

Now for the issue at hand, after posting my life story. : )

When I access the "control panel / administrative tools / computer management / disk management", it shows the old partition, with a healthy status, but it says that it is an unknown partition and does not have a drive letter assigned to it.

Even though it displays the old partition, it will not let me "change drive letter and paths" or "mark partition as active", because those options are greyed out.

Any guidance y'all can provide, to access the data (files) on the old partition, would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if anybody has any ideas about repairing the boot file on the old partition, I would love to hear those, also.

Thanks, in advance.

Stymie