On Tuesday 22 June 2004 09:28 am, Betti Ann & Preston Smith wrote: > My problem is - > > a. In W98, I can access and see/use the files on C: > > b. In W98, D:, E:, F:, G:, H:, and I: appear but when I try to access > them I am told that they are not connected. I assume that somehow W98 > sees I: and J: which are the Linux partitions. This suggests that > something is badly screwed up on the disk > > c. In Linux I can access and manipulate the files on C: through G: and > have full access to / and /home. > > Before I do anything, I must save the contents of C: through G: > > My solution - > > a. From Mdk 10.0, archive W98 drives C: through G: and write them to > CD. These drives have contents varying in size from 65 MB to 1.4 GB. I > need a Linux program that will backup/archive these drives in Zip format > (for compatability with W98) and burn them across multiple CDs. Does > such a program exist? > > b. Once I have solid backups, fdisk and reformat the 30 GB drive and > using unzip restore the contents of each of the W98 drives. > > c. Hopefully this will restore my system with no loss of data. (I am > not worried about losing data on the Linux partitions) > > I awill appreciate any help/suggestions you can give me.
Preston, if there are issues with accessing w98 partitions from within windows, simply because you can see those partitions in Linux doesn't mean that the issues don't exist. Attempting to copy those files off of damaged partitions may still result in errors, borked files, bad data, etc. Doing something to a damaged disk with Linux is no guarantee of success. However, given that you are trying to restore what appear to be damaged partitions, rather than trying to make a zip backup of the entire dataset, why not start small and work forward from there. Take the smallest drive and copy the contents into a directory in your Linux partition. Once you have the files there, you can remove the partition with DiskDrake, Create a new FAT partition and copy the files back. Hopefully, when you restart W98, the act of recreating the partition will have fixed whatever problems were preventing you from accessing it. Rinse and repeat with each partition in turn until you have an entirely new set of partitions. If you get errors when you try to copy the files under Linux, you can rest assured that there are data errors. Either stop there and try to get a good data restoration tool for windows to attempt to recover the files, or accept that there are losses and try to recover what you are able to and write the rest off. After transferring the files to the new partition, check them. If they are complete, you are good, if not, you still have the files on the Linux partition and if the files themselves are corrupt, well, they would have been just as corrupt if you had managed to zip them and write them to a CD, wouldn't they? My guess would be that there are probably going to be some data errors and bad CRC's when you try to copy the files, otherwise you probably wouldn't be having problems accessing windows partitions from within windows. If it were me, I would try to get a tool like Paragon Partition Manager, or Partition Magic and attempt to repair the partitions with that, especially if there are specific data errors when trying to copy the files. But that is your call. -- Bryan Phinney Software Test Engineer
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