Hi,

I have run into one of those problems with my hard disk ... If I boot
from a Win98 diskette, I can access normally my various partitions and
the files are there. But obviously, the FAT are very bad. Tried Fdisk,
even tried installing Linux which had helped me in a previous occasion,
but this time, all I know failed.

The issue is not so much the data, which was backup, but gaining again
access to this brand new disk.

Any suggestion keeping in mind there is no way I can boot to windows on
this machine would be greatly appreciated.

Best regards

--
John Doue

Have you tried Lenovo's stand alone diskette to rebuild the MBR? If you
have a valid Win partition of the drive and just can't boot to it then
that repair utility may help you

Phil Sherman


John Doue wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have run into one of those problems with my hard disk ... If I boot
> from a Win98 diskette, I can access normally my various partitions and
> the files are there. But obviously, the FAT are very bad. Tried Fdisk,
> even tried installing Linux which had helped me in a previous occasion,
> but this time, all I know failed.
>
> The issue is not so much the data, which was backup, but gaining again
> access to this brand new disk.
>
> Any suggestion keeping in mind there is no way I can boot to windows on
> this machine would be greatly appreciated.
>
> Best regards
>

Phil Sherman wrote:
> Have you tried Lenovo's stand alone diskette to rebuild the MBR? If you
> have a valid Win partition of the drive and just can't boot to it then
> that repair utility may help you
>
> Phil Sherman
>
>
> John Doue wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have run into one of those problems with my hard disk ... If I boot
>> from a Win98 diskette, I can access normally my various partitions and
>> the files are there. But obviously, the FAT are very bad. Tried Fdisk,
>> even tried installing Linux which had helped me in a previous
>> occasion, but this time, all I know failed.
>>
>> The issue is not so much the data, which was backup, but gaining again
>> access to this brand new disk.
>>
>> Any suggestion keeping in mind there is no way I can boot to windows
>> on this machine would be greatly appreciated.
>>
>> Best regards
>>
Hi Phil,

Never heard of such diskette, all I got was a hidden partition. Not much
help in such a case !

I finally solved my problem, not sure how. Considering I could not do
any worse, I tried using very old utilities, totally inadequate for the
job like NDD ! Something must have unlocked the situation since I
finally was able to delete one by one partitions on the disk with Dos
Fdisk and finally to create on with Partition Magic.

I am amazed to see that almost all utities that gobbles Gig of space do
not include the most fondamental ones which would fit on a diskette.
Experts can recover such drives by editing directly the Fat, but I do
not have the necessary knowledge.

This kind of disaster is rare but when it happens, one has very limited
options: throwing away a disk, or if the data justifies it, pay a lot of
money to recover it.

When large disks where under 1 Gig, Norton Utilities would save your
bacon. Now ...

I would still welcome ideas when you guys get tired of this thrilling
thread "HDDVD/Bluray: stillborn or coma" :-(

Best regards Phil and thanks for trying to help.



--
John Doue