Help, Can I rebuild FAT16?

[sbolton]

Hi,
I have Win98 1st edition. I installed a DUN update, uninstalled Office97 and installed Office2000 Pro. On reboot, the system would not boot. It appears the MBR is scrambled as well as something strange with the FAT. I can boot off Win98 CD and access drive C: It shows no files root, and only PROGRA~1 and WINDOWS directories. These directory entries seem correct but much is missing. Scandisk found no errors except free space misreported. It changed from 2gig free to 9.5 gig free on a 10 gig drive. 2gig free used to be the correct value.

Is there any way I can rebuild the FAT off the drive? I believe the programs and data are still there but I can't get to them.

Any help would be appreciated.

Steve

 

[Nothinman]

You're best bet is probably Norton Disk Doctor, it's a little better than scandisk at fixing off the wall problems. But I doubt you'll get it fixed, if the FAT is gone it's gone, there's practically no redundancy built into FAT. It was meant to be simple and quick on small drives, not reliable.

 

[corkyg]

What you need to do is repair your MBR. Boot with an emergency floppy that has FDISK and run it this way:

A:> FDISK /MBR

If that works, you should be able to restore things.

 

[sbolton]

Once I fix the MBR how do I rebuild the FAT?

Steve

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: corky-g
What you need to do is repair your MBR. Boot with an emergency floppy that has FDISK and run it this way:

A:> FDISK /MBR

If that works, you should be able to restore things.

All that does is refresh the bootloader code in the MBR, it doesn't fix corrupted partition tables or DBR/BPB tables. Sadly, that won't help in this case.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Nothinman
You're best bet is probably Norton Disk Doctor, it's a little better than scandisk at fixing off the wall problems. But I doubt you'll get it fixed, if the FAT is gone it's gone, there's practically no redundancy built into FAT. It was meant to be simple and quick on small drives, not reliable.

Well, there ARE two copies of the FAT, but in FAT16, they are located right next to each other, so if one gets vaped, there is a high probability that the other did too. :|

If the second copy is still (partially even) intact, that could help save a few files.

 

[Nothinman]

Well, there ARE two copies of the FAT, but in FAT16, they are located right next to each other, so if one gets vaped, there is a high probability that the other did too

You sure there's 2 in FAT16? I do know there's 2 copies with FAT32 but I wasn't sure about FAT16, but like you said since they're right next to each other the chance of one of them getting f'd and the other not is low. And I think I read somewhere that MS' drivers ignore the second copy anyway sort of a TODO thing that never happened =) I know scandisk will just ask if you want to sync the second copy if they're different.

If the second copy is still (partially even) intact, that could help save a few files.

NDD is one of the few utils I know that will ask you which FAT to use, which is why I mentioned it.

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: Nothinman

Well, there ARE two copies of the FAT, but in FAT16, they are located right next to each other, so if one gets vaped, there is a high probability that the other did too

You sure there's 2 in FAT16? I do know there's 2 copies with FAT32 but I wasn't sure about FAT16, but like you said since they're right next to each other the chance of one of them getting f'd and the other not is low. And I think I read somewhere that MS' drivers ignore the second copy anyway sort of a TODO thing that never happened =) I know scandisk will just ask if you want to sync the second copy if they're different.

If the second copy is still (partially even) intact, that could help save a few files.

NDD is one of the few utils I know that will ask you which FAT to use, which is why I mentioned it.

Yes. Btw, do you know if there are any DOS-based Norton DiskEdit versions that handle FAT32 as well as FAT16? I have some data-recovery jobs to do, and I used DiskEdit normally for manual recovery, but the version I have only does FAT16.