Uhhh.... w'hoppen' Windows?

(Starting this here...it may move?)

Happily putzing about in the computer, transcribing some lovely madrigals onto a network drive from the wife's computer (P-III 600MHZ w/ WIN 98SE and 512MB RAM) when the monitor just went black. No clicks, gurgles, buzzes, messages from Osamma or puffs of smoke.

Restarted the computer and POST came and went (shewing all the drives and the CD Burner as it did), got to the boot page and.... could not find a boot record in any of the usual places.

Tried this a few times (denial and belief in sympathetic magic... "maybe if I push the button THIS way...? ") but no luck.

Went into the BIOS setup and everything is just where and as it should be, with both drives reading as there and so stuck a startup disk in and restarted...Once "A" drive established, I swiched to the "C" and looked for the Windows directory....

Not even a directory for windows. Nor one for "Programs ", "Check and Discard ", or any of the usual directories I would expect to see on "C" drive, nor could I find a WINDOWS directory anywhere.

Bearing in mind that I had two drive in this one, is it possible that the "Primary" Hard Drive died, "just like that," and that the drive letters have now transferred to the secondary drive? It's the only "top-of-the-head" explanation that comes to my (alleged) mind.

It's been a LOOONG time since anything like this has happened to me and I'm at a loss to explain what happened. It's also hard to explain things when the owner of the computer is hitting you with a frying pan.

Your elucidations are sought.

 

wow...

would be interesting to run scandisk from the windows 98 cd and see if it was just the fat32 table that got clobbered ...

A trojan of some sort is definitely a possibility, but now-a-days they seem more bent on invading personnel information as oppossed to trashing hard drives..

cheers
Jake

 

More Info

Actually, I was wrong. Both HD's power up and spin fine... problem seems to be that the master disk (WD 20GB IDE) must have been formatted with WD's "E-Z-Format" utility, 'cos when I pulled the slave (Maxtor 60GB IDE) off line and then tried to boot up, I got a message that the master (WD) drive did not have a FAT32 partition, or it was corrupted, or that (most likely) a third-party format utility had been used.

I found my WD Diagnostic disk and d/loaded a new version but neither will run in DOS mode. Scandisk from the boot disk shows no errors, and the CMOS shows both drives as present. Fdisk cannot show me what's on th disk as it returns a "Disk Error" whehn I try to open it in DOS.

I know I would have made a rescue disk if offered the chance when using WD's format facility, but we've had several "deep cleanings" of the house and my dear wife seems to mave either misplaced or adios'ed the small floppy file box that always sat beside the computer downstairs... at least she professes no knowledge of it's whereabouts, so now...

Whaddo I do?

I'd hate to lose all that stuff on there (not to mention causing my wife to lose her 3400+ winning streak in Solitaire) but if I have to...

Any help will be appreciated.

 

What is wrong with WD Format ? Or is the "E-Z" format something that I am not familliar with ?

I have anywhere from 6.4gig to 80gig HDs with anything from Win3.1 on up to XP pro used on them and have never been setup or formated with anything other than WD software.

My Son is asking for help so I will be back later.

BillyBob

 

Reply

BillyBob, as far as I can see, not a thing wrong with the utility.... I've used it ever since I got my first "large" drive (a 4 GB) but this is the first time I haven't had the particular disk that I used to format the drive available and it's for SURE the first time that something like this has happened to me and I've gotten THAT message.

My suspicion is that I got a nice transient across the drive somehow, despite the shock absorbers I have in place and that it "did something" to the machine. (the standard bleat of the Luser).

If you know of a WD utility which I can transfer to a bootable disk ( I looked over their site but it's a bit confusing) that might allow me to recover the formatting without destroying the data on the drive or some other minor thing like walking across the pool, I'd be grateful.

 

http://support.wdc.com/download/index.asp
Get the Data Lifeguard tools. The dos download will create a floppy for you.

 

Well, it reads like I had another one of my Senior Moments and mis-understood what you meant.

However. I do agree that it is tuff to use something that you do not have.

I myself have a small floppy storage box that my Wife thought should set somewhere other than where I set it. We got that settled very quickly.

Hope you get things fixed soon.

BillyBob

 

Replies

BillyBob, thanks for the condolences.... The wife stoutly maintains that I threw it away, 'cos SHE wouldn't have touched it.....

Mark, the WD datalifeguard did as you indicated, but I can't find anything in it that would help restore the FAT tables on the drive. Did I miss something somewhere? I have the feeling (more denial?) that if that could be done the drive would came back to life. Thoughts?

I think I'm about to give up and reformat the (censored) drive totally and just endure the spousal abuse that will follow, unless anyone else has an idea.

 

Scandisk could be a help restoring a FAT file. There are two of them, scandisk can repair the FAT if the backup is good. Boot with a 98 floppy, and do this command.
scandisk /surface /autofix

 

reply

Well, it was a good idea but no joy... I can't even get the dirve recognized by the computer as being there. It's odd that I get the "no FAT system" message but when I try to run any scanning software (WD, MAXTOR [hey, any port in a storm, y'know?] R-studio, and several other "magic" programs, none of then can find the drive. I've gotten myself an external HD setup and will continue to experiment with the drive in both that and a spare chassis I have (AMDK6-300/256pc100) until I either decide to use it for a sinker or get it working again, but meantime I'm loading Win onto the "slave" and will run her box as a single drive unit.

Ah, the vicissitudes of computer technology.... nearly as much fun as politics but without the satisfactions.

Thanks to all.... I will continue to guard this channel just in case one of the 12-year old's who are forty times smarter than I comes up with something.