I'm afraid the only thing that can help you is installing partition magic 6.
Or idf you don't care about losing data you can try the windows2000 setup again and make sure you define your partitions the right way.

Try this:
 
Go to your control pannel and click administrative tools, then click computer management and click on disk management. It's a disk/parition management program included in windows 2000 (It might differ a little because I'm typing and checking the steps in XP).
 
Hope this helps.

Further to my problem. I don't have partition magic 6. Also when I reinstall windows it won't let me define a partition larger than 2 gig why ??. Any other ideas ?

Partitions formatted with FAT can only be a maximum of 2 gigs. FAT32 can be larger, but Windows 2000 setup limits new partitions to 32 gigs. Larger ones, it only allows NTFS. When seeing the partition screen in Windows setup, make sure you delete all partitions first, so you see your full 40 gigs of unpartitioned space. Then create a partition, and it should let you make it to the full size, minus 8 megs for the boot partition or whatever it feels like doing with it. Then, when you try to install on the newly partitioned space it should format it with NTFS for you. I'm not quite sure why it would limit it to FAT. Hope this helps.

Or, rather, you should be given a choice of NTFS or FAT32 because it is smaller than 32 gigs. Sorry, was thinking 40.

Jazzcat, thanks for the tips. As an update I have managed to install win2000 on a pre-formatted 10 gigs HD. Now I want to totally reformatt my 30 gig slave drive in FAT 32 ( I can't use NTFS as it has major conflicts with software i use). However when I go into disk management utility all I see is the original 2gig partition. when I delete this partition and try and reformatt the disk to 30 gig fat 32. All it wants to formatt is the original 2gig... why? I need 30 gig not 2 gig... going crazy... win2000.... worst mistake of my pc life