[rstan45764]

Well, I got home and tried to boot either of my normal hard drives. Windows boot CD said that both were corrupted. There was nothing that I could do except use my Western Digital disk to format and repartition my C:\ drive. I now have some software loaded on it and am back in business with no further problems. Painful, but effective.

My slave drive with a ton of files (like photos and such) still does not work. Anytime that I try to open it it still asks me if I want to format. Do you have any ideas on this drive? I may have to format it, but would hate to lose all of the files.

Thanks again for all of your help.

[Advertisements]

Hi rstan45764, I am sorry to hear about that.

Anyways with regard to your F: drive which contains a lot of important infos on it, we can still recover it without reformatting. All we need is to repair re-install the Win 2000 OS.

View this guides for related articles, it will be good to have them print out.

INDEX: http://www.windowsreinstall.com/indexwin2k.htm

EMERGENCY REPAIR DISK : http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=158866
MS-DOS FLOPPY DISK: http://www.bootdisk.com

REPAIR INSTALLS:
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows200...epair/index.htm

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows200...tipageindex.htm

After you had successfully made a backup of all the important files from it, you have verify if the OS still contains malwares by running a HijackThis scan on it for analysis.

Tell me how it works.

[kool808]

Hi rstan45764, I am sorry to hear about that.

Anyways with regard to your F: drive which contains a lot of important infos on it, we can still recover it without reformatting. All we need is to repair re-install the Win 2000 OS.

View this guides for related articles, it will be good to have them print out.

INDEX: http://www.windowsreinstall.com/indexwin2k.htm

EMERGENCY REPAIR DISK : http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=158866
MS-DOS FLOPPY DISK: http://www.bootdisk.com

REPAIR INSTALLS:
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows200...epair/index.htm

http://www.windowsreinstall.com/windows200...tipageindex.htm

After you had successfully made a backup of all the important files from it, you have verify if the OS still contains malwares by running a HijackThis scan on it for analysis.

Tell me how it works.

[rstan45764]

Thanks for hanging in with me.

I tried the below suggestion, and in the repair process Windows says that the drive is corrupted and can not be repaired.

Any other thoughts?

[kool808]

Can you still boot to MS DOS Prompt? Lets try using the scandisk, then fix it. Let us see how it goes

[rstan45764]

Dumb question, but how do you boot to MS DOS in Windows 2k? It was easy in older Windows systems.

[kool808]

You will need a bootdisk to do this. Review the post where you will make an emergency repair disk.

[rstan45764]

I've got the dos disk done and can run scandisk but when I boot to dos it does not read either of my hard drives. It only lists the a:/ drive and my 2 cd rom drives as r: and s:. Since it can't seem to find either hard drive then it won't let me run scandisk.

Any ideas?

[kool808]

Okay I am still gathering enough symptoms to verify that this is a hardware related problem, which means a bad physical damage on the hard disk. Before we come to that conclusion we will do what we can to save it first.

So the emergency disk wont work, on the above suggestions for the repair install which of the two procedures did you follow and at which step did you failed to repair it? Did you try repair install using both the emergency disk method and CD ROM method?

Let us try another solution, you need to find a system with an old OS perhaps a 9x
(Win 98) Make Win 98 as master, and your corrupted drive as slave. Make use of the Win 98 CD to boot into DOS Prompt upon startup. This way you can use the DOS commands for scandisk as well as view the directories. Just make sure when you boot the Win 98 CD you should choose the start with CD-ROM support.

Let us see how it goes.

[rstan45764]

After much work I finally got my Windows 98 PC to recognize my other hard drive. I rebooted into DOS and asked it to Scandisk. It said that this drive could not be scanned. It did scandisk my normal Win 98 C: drive.

So to sum up where I am at:

1. Install in Win 98 machine as slave and scandisk - Scandisk would not scan the hard drive. In My computer it listed the hard drive and when I tried to click it asked if I wanted to format

2. Windows start-up disk (A:) and fast repair all list the drive and say thast it is corrupted and can not be repaired.

3. Windows CD method (CD) also said that the drive is corrupted and that it could not repair.

4. A MS DOS boot from the Windows 2K PC yielded nothing because NTFS drives are not recognized in DOS.

I have no other suggestions. I am open to any other potential solutions that you may have.

[kool808]

Let us try using these free softwares if we can recover some of your important files.
http://www.pcworld.com/downloads/collectio...lid,1295,00.aspL

[rstan45764]

I first tried PC Inspector file recovery. It ran for hours but didn't find anything. Interestingly enough it only maxed my hard drive out at 180 G and it is a 300 G hard drive.

I am currently running Virtual Lab data Recovery and it is mapping as it is working and shows both NTFS and FAT folders on the diagram. It isn't finished, but since this is trial software, I am not sure if it will recover them or simply map the drive and show that it's there.

But that's where I'm at now. With 14 min to go it says that it's found 35,503 files.

[kool808]

interesting then that is good to hear, let me know how it goes.

* crosses finger, Good Luck

[rstan45764]

Good News, Bad News...

Virtual Lab found them and I can even preview them.

However, to save them they charge you $100 per Gig.

That gets fairly expensive. Is there any software that can do the same for free or does this give you any other ideas on how to fix?

[kool808]

okay give me a moment we should be able to recover that without expenses

[rstan45764]

Any other thoughts on software?