[Dyre Straits]

I'm trying to figure out something after having a hard drive corruption problem last evening.

On my 98SE Machine, I lost the ability to boot into Windows. So, I reinstalled Windows and lost the ability to view all my other files and programs.

Then I started reinstalling devices, etc.

Finally, I started trying to reinstall programs e.g. Office 2000 and it wouldn't install. It would show the initial Installation and then quit.

Long story short:

From the directory of 98SE that 40 GB HD shows about 38 GB free space. BUT, if I run VirusScan from my Networked computer, it runs the scan through all of my FORMER files and programs. In other words, VirusScan sees and scans everything that was on that drive prior to the crash.

BUT, from the 98SE machine it only shows what's happened SINCE I reinstalled Windows and even in DOS it shows only what can be seen from within the Windows directory.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might restore/recover the status of the drive at this point?


ThX!

[Shrink]

Originally posted by Dyre Straits
I'm trying to figure out something after having a hard drive corruption problem last evening.

On my 98SE Machine, I lost the ability to boot into Windows. So, I reinstalled Windows and lost the ability to view all my other files and programs.

Then I started reinstalling devices, etc.

Finally, I started trying to reinstall programs e.g. Office 2000 and it wouldn't install. It would show the initial Installation and then quit.

Long story short:

From the directory of 98SE that 40 GB HD shows about 38 GB free space. BUT, if I run VirusScan from my Networked computer, it runs the scan through all of my FORMER files and programs. In other words, VirusScan sees and scans everything that was on that drive prior to the crash.

BUT, from the 98SE machine it only shows what's happened SINCE I reinstalled Windows and even in DOS it shows only what can be seen from within the Windows directory.

Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I might restore/recover the status of the drive at this point?


ThX!

First thing, I grab another drive and create an image of the drive using Ghost so that if something gets hosed while trying to recover data, you can fix it.

It sounds as though your FATS or MBR is hosed. Did you run scandisk on it? That should fix it. When it boils down to it, i'd grab any data you can now and delete the partition, fdisk, and reformat.

Another program for recovering data is Spinrite - it has gotten good reviews. I would be imaging the drive and then you can experiment with different ways of trying to fix it - you can restore the image if you want to try again. Good luck!

[The_Neon_Cowboy]

if its the mbr run on a win98 boot disk run "fdisk /mbr" will rebuild the mbr for the drive but youll still have to resinstall everything agin ... any program the modifyed the mbr will need to do so again....

might run scandisk too!

[Dyre Straits]

Ran Scandisk almost immediately. It didn't find any problems. ???


It's strange to me that VirusScan can still see all the original files from the Networked computer, but there's no way to access them from the networked computer. I get a 'unavailable' message if I try to do that.

Thanks for the replies.

[astrolabos]

Looks like you need a data recovery programm. I have a few but they are all for win2k/XP

[merry]

There was "Lost and Found" from PowerQuest.