Partitions have vanished

[Jukeboxs]

Hi there.

A question regarding a friend's old HP Pentium 2 machine (~166Mhz), using Win 95.

About a year ago, I linked up a new hard drive for him (DiamondMax, still within warranty period) and spit it into about 10 partitions, to get round the 2Gb restriction imposed by his machine. He has been using C:\ as his Windows drive, and the others for various other uses.

All was fine until last week, when he noticed a marked change in what he thought was the speed of his internal fan, and then his PC froze with a blank screen (so, possibly hard drive noise instead..). On rebooting, he noticed that his C:\ drive was okay (obviously as it rebooted!), but he had lost use of the others within Windows (Explorer).

I have not yet had a look at the machine, and am looking for some advice from you guys before I do so. Should the first thing I do be go into 'fdisk' and see if the other partitions still exist? If they do, how do I go about getting them recognised in Windows (if possible, avoiding reformatting/repartitioning)? If they don't, is there any way of restoring the data that was on them?

Thanks as always for your wisdom. Much appreciated!

All the best,
Jukeboxs.

[jmatt]

http://dos.li5.org/downloads/rec.htm
http://home19.inet.tele.dk/svolaf/utilities.htm

I have never seen ANYTHING like this particular freeware device driver. While only weighing in
under 2k, and taking up about 3-5k of memory, this little device driver scans your entire
drive for lost partitions, it then assigns read-only drive letters to them to allow you to
recover data.