My system has two physical hardrives and two partitions on each drive. The first drive has fat32 format and is attached to primary IDE channel as master. The seond drive has ntfs format and is attached as secondary as master. I had a tri-boot system. Win98se on the first drive. Winxp Pro on the primary partitionand Win2k Server on the logical partition of the second drive. After installing and attaching the 3rd (brand new) harddrive to primary IDE as slave, my system couldn't boot (bios detected bootsector on the first drive but prints "invalide system disk drive").
To check what has happened to the 1st harddrive, I swapped the second drive to the primary IDE master and the first drive to secondary IDE slave. Then I booted into Winxp Pro and saw all the files in the primary partition of the first drive have cryptic characters in their filename and the logical partition just vanished completely. I decided to move all the data files on the second hard drive to the 3rd hard drives. Then I reformatted and repartitioned the second hard drive. Then I installed the Win98se and Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro 5.12 to the 2nd hard drive. I could only recover few of the files from the first hard drive. I am going to try PowerQuest's Lost and Found next. Some people told me it could be a virus which overrided the MBR of the first hard drive. I am kind of doubting that since I had Norton Antivirus installed on my system and I updated the virus definition files regularily. However, I am going to rescan the 1st drive just to be sure that my system is virus free. If there is indeed a virus, will fdisk /mbr correct the problem (assuming the virus didn't altered the partition table). Is there another way to recovery my files besides the aforementioned methods?
To check what has happened to the 1st harddrive, I swapped the second drive to the primary IDE master and the first drive to secondary IDE slave. Then I booted into Winxp Pro and saw all the files in the primary partition of the first drive have cryptic characters in their filename and the logical partition just vanished completely. I decided to move all the data files on the second hard drive to the 3rd hard drives. Then I reformatted and repartitioned the second hard drive. Then I installed the Win98se and Ontrack's EasyRecovery Pro 5.12 to the 2nd hard drive. I could only recover few of the files from the first hard drive. I am going to try PowerQuest's Lost and Found next. Some people told me it could be a virus which overrided the MBR of the first hard drive. I am kind of doubting that since I had Norton Antivirus installed on my system and I updated the virus definition files regularily. However, I am going to rescan the 1st drive just to be sure that my system is virus free. If there is indeed a virus, will fdisk /mbr correct the problem (assuming the virus didn't altered the partition table). Is there another way to recovery my files besides the aforementioned methods?
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