If you have another system which groks NTFS (NT, 2000, XP), change the master/slave jumper on the trouble drive and install it as a slave in the working system to see if it can read the drive at all. If not, you are definitely going to need some third-party software to try to access it. If the only available testbed system is Win98/ME, go to Sysinternals at http://www.sysinternals.com/win9x/98utilities.shtml and download either NTFSDOS or NTFS for Windows 98 to perform the test. They're both free, at least the read-only versions are. That's all you really need in this case, so that'll be fine.
WRT partition management tools, there are several major options available. Partition Magic, Partition Commander, Acronis Partition Expert, etc. None are free, and may not be a good choice for attempting to recover data, as their focus is on partition management: sizing, resizing, etc. There are high-powered administrator-level packages that claim to be able to recover files from dead volumes, etc., but they also come with a high-powered ticket price. Just how valuable/irreplaceable is this data, anyway?
With USB external drives running less than a buck per gig nowadays, it only makes sense to back up all your essential data to an external drive before beginning a major, and potentially calamitous, OS change. And for future reference, if you find yourself doing this again with a drive containing an existing OS, I recommend first doing the upgrade, THEN converting the drive to NTFS. Any OS which supports it has the capability to do the conversion after installation, and that way if you run into difficulty with the install you know (a) that it did not have anything to do with the drive format conversion, and (b) that you can still access the drive using the tools you had available previously. The fewer the number of elements in a process, the easier it is to troubleshoot problems with that process if they arise.
Cheers, Scott
----- Original Message ----- From: "Cheryl D Wise" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <wdvltalk@lists.wdvl.com>
Sent: Thursday, March 31, 2005 6:10 PM
Subject: RE: [wdvltalk] Serious hard drive problem
I've used that to recover some critical data before. It was a major pain but
it did get the file I needed. I don't know how well it would work for
recovering an entire drive.
I have seen utilities that would repair a master boot record without killing
the disk but I haven't need one in so long that I haven't a clue what the
one I used in the Windows 98 days was called.
There used to be a program called "partition magic" that would let you
resize a partition without damaging the data then format and install the OS
just on part of the drive.
I wonder if Paragon's hard disk manager would do any good since you can boot
off of a cd with it then work on the disk separately
http://www.paragon-gmbh.com/f_fm.htm
Cheryl D. Wise Certified Professional Web Developer Microsoft FrontPage MVP http://wiserways.com Office: 713-353-0139
-----Original Messa
Thank you! I woulds love to try that utility. It makes sense that it has a
chance of working!
Diane
Ross Clutterbuck wrote:
Diane:
Sounds like the File Allocation Table might have gone the way of the Dodo but for the life of me I can't remember if it's possible to rebuild a FAT without killing the data.
One thing I would suggest is try booting into pure DOS and see if you can read off the disk. I have a utility here called NTFSDOS which allows the reading of NTFS drives within DOS. I can e-mail it to you off list if you wish and see if you have any joy accessing the drive.
I'll have a looksie around and let you know if I can think of anything.
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