Bad partition Table

[CdnMade]

ok i have a huge problem that i need fixed for a friend

What happened was he was trying to install windows me on top on 95. and did a bunch of crap. He is not even sure what he did but now it will not boot into windows at all and says it is a non dos partition on fdisk.

What if anything can i do to recover all his data.He was doing alot with digital photos and writing a small book. He has countless hours into this and realy needs his data.

 

[CQuinn]

Which FDISK, the Windows 95 version or the Windows ME version?
If its the Windows 95 version it might be having trouble recognizing partition info put in by the Windows ME install,
or the partition may have been coverted to FAT32, which W95 would definitely not recognize.

a utility like Partition Magic might see the partition properly (and maybe give you some options for repair), or you
can see if you can find a copy of Lost and Found, or some other drive recovery software on the net.

(L&F was discontinued by Powerquest, but there may still be places to get it from).

 

[cleverhandle]

Since it may just be that the partition type is wrong, or the OS install went bad, see if you can remove the disk from his machine and read it as an extra drive on yours. Better to try that first than go right to recovery utilities. If you're lucky, you can just burn his data, wipe the old drive, and reinstall cleanly.

 

[obenton]

... or, if it's now a FAT32 partition, you can boot with a win98 startup floppy, which reads FAT32, and copy his data using DOS. Any current version of fdisk, however, would recognize FAT32 as a DOS partition, so it may be that the partition table got corrupted. In this case, you can rewrite it (a backup copy is stored on the drive) by, again, booting with the win98 startup floppy and, from the command prompt, running "fdisk /mbr" (the drive must be the C: drive for this to work).

 

[CdnMade]

yea i tried in a windows me system as a slave and it did not even see it.

 

[Maetryx]

If the hard drive is not even recognized by your system, then I doubt it was installed correctly. Are you sure you had the jumpers set to slave? Did you try installing it as a master instead? Did you remember to connect it to the ribbon cable and the power cable? Dumb questions, I know, but if the drive wasn't recognized by your system AT ALL, then there is a hardware problem.

Or did you mean that your BIOS detected it, but Windows did not?

 

[CdnMade]

so it may be that the partition table got corrupted. In this case, you can rewrite it (a backup copy is stored on the drive) by, again, booting with the win98 startup floppy and, from the command prompt, running "fdisk /mbr" (the drive must be the C: drive for this to work).


won't this erase all the data from the drive?

 

[CdnMade]

bios will detect it but windows will not.

i know the drive will work if i fdisk it and reinstall windows but i need to get the data off the hd first

 

[PH0ENIX]

The 'fdisk /mbr' command re-writes the Master Boot Record, changing it to the MBR from the version of windows that fdisk was from.

The MBR is basically what tells the system which files on the drive are used to boot - this command is non-destructive (except to machines that use boot loaders, ie: linux/NT boxes, but it can still be repaired), and will do absolutely NOTHING at all to repair the partition table.

Now, if BIOS sees it, but windows does not, and a version of Fdisk from anything after Win95B (it's only 95a that doesn't support FAT32) sees it as non-dos,
then it's pretty safe to say that the partition table is corrupt.

Put the drive in your system, and try the suggested recovery utilities. Personally, because it says Non-DOS partition and not an 'Unknown' file system, I wouldn't hold out much hope...

Good luck though 😉