Hard drive partition turned into a NON MSDOS partition????

[stockjock]

I was building a computer for my father and what I did was put in a new 20gb HD and I partitioned it into to drives, a small 2 gb partition for the OS (Win ME) and 18gb for data and programs. I also wanted to take out his older and smaller drive from his old computer and put it into the new computer so he could have access to his old data, the old drive had Win 98 on it and that drive only had one partition on it. When I put it into the new system and set it to slave..the bios recognized it but WinME would not recognize it in the My Computer area....but it does see it in the device manager but there is no drive letter assigned to it. So I figure why not take out the old drive and put it in another computer as the master drive and the same thing happens...gets detected by bios..but of course it will not boot to WinME...
So I went into Fdisk to check it and it is telling me that the drive is a NON MSDOS drive...
I also copied over the entire drive to one of the the partitions on the larger drive and all that did was make the larger drives partition fail as well....
Can anyone tell me what happend?
And what to do to recover the data from the smaller drive...I know its still there because I saw it there when I did the backup to the larger drive with Maxblast utility....

Ohh..one thing I forgot, I cannot access the drive using an emergency startup disk...tells me the ol' Abort Retry etc...message..

any help would be appreciated..