I'm trying to figure out exactly what I did and what's happening with this drive. I haven't dealt with it in a while, so this is somewhat of a surprising situation after working with it a few months later.

This is a 500GB SSD that has been partitioned to boot into DOS and Windows 98, with a shared logical partition at the end. There is also a 1GB partition at the beginning of the drive which does nothing other than run GRUB4DOS. The second DOS partition runs FreeDOS and the third is Windows 98. The partitions were configured using GParted. GRUB4DOS is booting from DOS 7.1.

The mystery is how drive letters appear at the command prompt, which files are visible, and the actual drive letters vs what shows in FDISK.

At the GRUB4DOS command prompt (DOS 7.1) I can see the DOS and WIN98 partitions as D and E. DIR on D shows and empty drive and E shows files for Windows 98. However, drive D (FreeDOS) is NOT empty, and I can boot to it and see it's files from its own command prompt, but not from DOS 7.1.

I also examined the drives using FDISK, which shows the DOS and WIN98 partitions as drive letters E and F... but there is no E and F. They are D and E.

I'm still trying to sort it out. It's all very bizarre.