XP confused over hard drive allocation letters

I have 3 physical hard drives and each is divided into 6 partitions, and
formatted as Fat 32. "Drive 1" is my system drive and is working perfectly.
"Drive 2" was to be a fully mirrored backup drive. But when my system
crashed last year I couldn't figure out how to turn it into a system disk,
so after reformatting and rebuilding "Drive 1", "Drive 2" basically became a
data backup drive (it is not being mirrored). Once in a while the system
balked when rebooting and thought something was wrong with "Drive 2". {I
had "tried" to make the first partition on it "active" but didn't ever think
I had actually succeeded, and am not sure how to confirm if I did, and
whether that has anything to do with the problem.} Last weekend I bought and
partitioned "Drive 3" by inserting it into the place of "Drive 2" and
running the Western Digital partitioning software on it. At this point the
system recognized everything on "Drive 1" and "Drive 3" perfectly ("Drive 2"
being disconnected) assigning the partitions the letters C thru H for "Drive
1", and K thur P for "Drive 3" (the same as it did for "Drive 2" whenever it
was connected in this position.

But then I connected all three and everything went haywire. "Drive 1" and
"Drive 2" were in their normal spots as Master, and Slave on the first data
cable (40 pin, 80 wire) , and "Drive 3" (the newest) was set as Slave on the
second data cable. When I rebooted, the system recognized all 3 hard drives
and properly allocated drive letter assignments of C thru V (I, & J are CD
Drives). But it was having some difficulty with "Drive 2" so I shut it down
and removed the new "Drive 3" completely, and rebooted. This time it took
forever to reboot, and when it finally did it was assigning some drive
letters to "Drive 2" correctly ("Drive 1" was fine) but others in the Q to V
range. I rebooted several times with just Drives 1& 2 connected in their
normal configuration. Each time the system wanted to do an analysis on one
or more of the "Drive 2" partitions and I let it do that. Each time the
system took forever to reboot, and when it did the assigned letters were
wrong for "Drive 2", and the logicals could not be accessed. When "Drive 2"
is totally removed the system reboots quickly and properly.

I have important information on "Drive 2" and don't want to loose it by
reformatting. I have a copy of Partition Magic which is about 5 years old
but doesn't seem to work on XP. We also have a Win98SE in the house as a
possible resourse. Anybody have any suggestions?

Ted Smith