My Win 98 crashed while I was trying to use Norton Utilities, and it ended up that I couldn't boot into either 98 or XP. I decided to ditch 98, and reinstalled XP from new, but now the NTFS partition that was on the drive that 98 was on won't let me access it!

I've tried Norton Utilities, but that won't see the drive. I've also tried Part Magic 7 and XP's computer management, but they both just say it's 'unallocated'! It's about 25 gb and full of MP3's!

Someone please help! How can I fix the drive without destroying the data?!!!

Thanks!

:confused:

Don't know if this will work....I had a similar situation.


If you have another hd. Install XP on it. Then place the hd w/ 25 gb of mp3s as a slave drive. XP will see the 2nd hd even if it is different partition file system.

If it is different parition file system, you will get a win xp plug and play hardware wizard. walk through it and the os will see the data on your 2nd Hard drive.

Thanks, but no, it won't work. The drive has three partitions; the first FAT 32 with Win 98, the second FAT 32 with my documents, and the third is NTFS.

Any other ideas?!

:(

Hi Matt, win 98, thats a fat32 system and won't see an NTFS partition, the partition with the MP3's on, was this your C drive before? How is your drive split now? I know its got three partitions but whats the fat system that the MP3's are on. I didn't know you could run PM 7 on XP, PM 8 has been released and this sorts the problem

Yes, it was previously the C drive, with Win 98 on the first (active) partition, then Documents in a small second partition (also FAT), then a third large 25gb partition that was formatted to NTFS. I only kept Win 98 dual booting as a means of maintenance if I had probs with XP. XP was on drive F, which was also FAT32.

I've tried Part Magic 7, as that's the one I've got. I had a look at Part Magic 8 on the Powerquest site, but it's only a trial version and says it won't let you actually make any changes. I don't really want to have to pay for it if I don't know it'll work!

I've just installed the trial version of PM8, and it also shows it as unallocated, and it won't let me repair it (there's no option to). I does have an option to undelete a partition, but it searches and says there's not one to undelete.....

I don't like this.....! :(

Hi Matt, so your partition thats got the MP3s on used to be your C:/ drive? but now you reinstalled an OS on a different partition? the old C:/ drive became corrupt but the C: status remained, so your os on a different partition has allocated a new C:/ drive, but you cant have that, without mulitiple boot options.. is this correct upto now?

Originally posted by Nuttapper
I didn't know you could run PM 7 on XP, PM 8 has been released and this sorts the problem

I dunno if its supposed to work or not, but I definately formatted and partitioned by 80 GB Maxtor HD with PM7 on windows XP :confused:

No, that partition wasn't C, it was something else. C was the first partition with Win 98, then D was another drive for storage (I've got a RAID controller with four hard disks, two had OS's on, the other were for storage, etc, with additional partitions on each drive. In all there were 7 partitions, but now only 6!)

The MP3's were on a logical partition, just on the same drive as Win 98. I've tried Get Data Back, but the problem there is that there's seperate programs for Fat & NTFS! It keeps hanging! The drive makes a really odd noise when it gets stuck too.....!

This is not how I wanted to spend my weekend....!

:(

can you see the partition in DOS Matt??

DMC386, was the xp partition NTFS or FAT32?

How do I know if DOS sees it? It's NTFS, so should it still show in DOS?

XP was on FAT, but now NTFS.

I've found a trial program, Recover It All, that will see the failed logigal partition, and it currently listing all the files on the drive. Trouble is, it's going to cost $45 to register it if I can't find anything else that'll work!

I'm not concerned about the state of the drive and partitions, I just want to get the files off so hoepfully I'll be able to just reformat the whole drive.

@Nuttapper

The HD the program was instaled on was NTFS and the new drive I formatted as NTFS as well :)

Hi Matt, did you try Xcopy built into DOS? if your unsure on how to use it, launch the help and support from the start menu (XP) and in the search box type xcopy, if the files can be seen they can be copied

I've converted the two FAT partitions to NTFS, and I'm currently running Getdataback, but I don't know if I used the correct serial. It seems to be OK, but I won't know until it's finished it's scan, and it's curretnly saying it'll be another five hours! It does look quite promising though. At least if I can recover them all to another drive I can them reformat the drive (plus I'll then know if the drive is knackered.....what's IBM guarantee like? I've only had it a few years!)