Lost FAT32

[E-Liam]

Hi all,

It had to happen, I'm after a bit of help meself now..

First off the techy bits..

PIII 500
786mB RAM
Win98 Plus!
Mobo ASUS i440BX-P2B-00

The C: drive is fine, but after a crash, the D and E drives no longer have a file system.. ie. they no longer show as FAT32 ( I think that's the main problem anyway). None of the inboard software recognises their existence except to show their tags in My Computer., and so I can't read or write to either.

I've booted into DOS, and they aren't there. I did the usual DIR, CHKDSK, SCANDISK with no luck.

Is there a nice simple way to give back the file allocation to the disc, perhaps a little script on a floppy I can insert on boot? (It's never gonna be that easy of course.

I'm not too fussed about getting back the stuff on D:, it just had programs on. I would like though if possible to recover the data on E:. Nothing life threatening there either, but a lot of documents backed up off an old (and now formatted, and used by my mum) computer.

When the crash happened, I firstly went back to an old restore point, and defaulted the BIOS. In the end, I copied SYS C: from a boot disk. Probably too much remedy there..

Any ideas, before i cock it up any further?

Cheers

Liam

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Liam,

Did you try putting fdisk on a bootable floppy to see what the partitions look like?

If you think the partitions were deleted, you can use:

Active@ Partition Recovery

It is one of the programs I always carry with my of tech calls.

Another option would be to pull the drive from the machine and put it on a WinXP Machine so that though WinXP, you can take a look at the drive to see if you can access the partitions there.

Take Care,

Richard

[E-Liam]

Hi Richard,

thanks for the suggestions. I've just formatted D: and all seems to be well. Just running scandisk as we speak, before putting it into use. There wasn't anything that really needed, and now it's good to go.

Apparently, the E: drive is in MS-DOS compatability mode.. even though DOS can't see it??? Will that active partition tool help with that? I did notice an option with My Comupter | (E right click | Format that just copied system files over to the drive. Would this reinstate FAT32 to the drive?

I'll have a look at that link in a minute, just updating my site (subtle huh?) , and let you know how it goes.

Thanks again

Liam

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Liam,

That sure is a lot of trophies! You should get one for each person you have helped here.

Before I would try even the recovery tool, I would try putting the drive on a WinXP Machine since WinNT has a better chance of reading the partition and even M$ Recovery Console could help you repair it if the partition is damaged.

Take Care,

Richard

[E-Liam]

Cheers Richard,

Re: the trophies, thankyou, but as far as help here goes, I think you are a few of orders of magnitude higher in the help stakes than I'll ever be..

Hooking up to an XP machine could be interesting. I'll see who I can get to help me on that..

Off up the club to see who's got XP now.. I believe beer is the correct currency for these sort of things..

Thanks again,

Liam

[rickity]

Liam

Check your PMs and we'll see what we can do.

Rickity

[E-Liam]

Hi all,

and thanks for the help. I've sorted it out now. I woke up early this morning and had a play around. I looked at the site you mentioned Richard, and the brain wasn't up to creating boot disks that early in the morning.

I thought I'd have a quick look around ZDNet first, and I found a program that did the job.

Restorer2000 Data Recovery Software 2.0

The trial version did the job fine, and in the background. It recovered any files below 64Kb in size (the full purchased version handled the bigger stuff), which was plenty to save what I needed, ie; documents. It also, (although the files were too big to recover) gave me the names of all the programs on there, so I can reload the ones that couldn't be recovered.

So I'm all sorted now, except to format the E: drive to get it running again.

Thanks again.

Rick, check your PMs in a minute..

Cheers

Liam

[Naples Air Center, Inc.]

Liam,

For file recovery I use the sister program to Active@ Partition Recovery:

Active@ File Recovery for Windows

Which is one of other the programs I always carry with my of tech calls.

Take Care,

Richard