Corrupted hard drive?

I have 2 HDD's on my win98 system, both FAT32. the first is my C: drive and the second I had partitioned as D,E & F drives. I used D: to store a lot of my extraneous programs to avoid cluttering the C: drive.

I was working with DVD DeCrypter when suddenly a heap of programs I had running in the background, as well as DVD Decrypter, shut down. I don't recall the exact error msg, but basically it seemed that win98 had a meltdown as it sometimes does. All the programs were ones loaded on drive D: I rebooted, but when it was up and running, I found I now have no D,E or F drive. C drive works normally. Fdisk shows the second physical drive (40 Gb) as having an extended partion on it, but no logical drives. An attempt to re-partition showed that there was only 6 Mb available to partition. A check with PC Inspector shows the entire drive as "lost ", and can see the lost clusters. So the data is still all there, and Fdisk recognises it as in use?

It appears as though the master boot record or the partition table or both have been wiped, but the extended partition remains. I don't want to do a low level format until I know what happened and if it can be recovered.

has anyone else had an experience like this? Is the MBR and partition table able to be restored? What could have caused this - a virus?? Which one? I did an online virus check and came up with nothing. An interesting cluster picked up by PC Inspector was a folder labelled "Cluster ***** (root) which had two file clusters inside: one was named DESTROY\.SPY and the other was PROGRAM. (can't recall the extension, but it started with F). Sounded sus to me: any opinions?

Well, I am completely bamboozled by this, hope someone out there can give me some clue as to what is happening.

Thanks,
Andrew

 

It sounds like your Master File Table is lost. Try some of these hits from Google while waiting for better advice:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=recovering+master+file+table

 

Thanks

Thanks for your reply, surferdude.
I did as you suggested and ended up downloading Getdataback - it did a good job of accessing the drive and I was able to get most of my digital photo's etc back; the program files were not able to be recovered.

after that I tried Fdisk, but it only recognised about 7 Gb of unused space. I downloaded Powermax from the Maxtor site and did a low-level format, then ran maxblast3 to repartition the drive.

The drive is now alive and well, but I would appreciate any opinions on what caused the problem in the first place, and whether it is likely to occur again!

regards,
Andrew

 

Andrew, I think it's reasonable to assume it was one of those flukes that these one-eyed monsters are subject to. If you did a complete surface scan without any defects being mapped out, I'd say the drive is probably as good as ever.

Even so, I always use disk partition imaging on a weekly basis and keep several past copies on another drive. I recommend that for you. It only takes 15 minutes/week, Sunday morning is a good time, and the peace of mind is "Priceless" as they say on T.V.

I use Acronis True Image but Ghost is also very good. I wouldn't operate without such a plan.