currupt hard drive?

[kodama]

:d I don't get to talk to other people often about computer stuff so my terminology may be a little different from the norm - but instead I'll try to be as desciptive about my problem...

I have a 60GBseagate hard drive.

The first time I set my computer up, with windows 98 korean version and Linux SuSE, it up I had no problems until I tried to play wolfenstein ET on it (my computer has a 450mHz pentium II by the way) and that was the day I realised I killed my computer.. (it wouldn't boot to the OS or something.. can't remember) and I formatted the hard drive.

The second time, I installed kazaa and windows 98 kor would not boot up.. or something (can't remember). Anyway I formatted the disk, and reinstalled windows 98kor and linux.

Then a week later Microsoft scandisk killed linux's boot precedure, so I formatted my hard drive yet again and installed only windows 98.

Then three whole weeks went by, and I was feeling really good because I wasn't sitting in my room fixing my comptuer all weekend.. and then last, last week monday, the hard drive would not boot up. (it would not move on from the part with the windows 98 logo and the wavey bar at the bottom) So I took the hard drive out of that computer and put it in my other computer (300mHz processor, 10GB+3GB hard drive, 192MB RAM, windows98 korean version) as the secondary slave, because I didn't want to bother setting up the OS and devices again. The hard drive worked OK for about a week...

Last, last sunday night, I was trying to listen to an mp3 I had on my 60gb seagate, and I noticed all the file names were weird characters. They weren't korean or english or chinese or japanese (all the languages I have on my computer): they did not look like they were roman based at all. The folder names were all weird as well, however I didn't remember renaming anything, and I didn't try to rename any of the folders or files back to their original names because I figured that might harm the disk more. (plus I didn't know what folder was which or what file was which) The first program I ran to fix my harddrive was norton anti-virus, beucase I thought it could possibly be a virus. However norton anti-virus froze, and I had to pull the plug for my computer in the back.

When windows 98 was booting up it ran scandisk before windows booted up (as it always does when I don't shut the comptuer down properly) and then scandisk froze when it got to my 60gb seagate hard drive. So I restarted the computer again and exited scandisk before it could reach my 60GB hard drive. I booted to windows 98 successfully. I checked my 60gb hard drive. No files. All my files just kind of .. became nameless.

As of now I can tell that something is taking up 36GB in my 60GB, but windows98 claims there are no files or folders in there. I think the hard drive might of gone currupt, like how a diskette or a CD can go currupt.. but the data seems to still be in there.. gah.. help help

Is there anyway Icould get my files out of that hard drive? If I were to read the hard drive in linux would that work? Or maybe there's a program that can help me extract files in my hard drive...

[escher]

sounds like you might have a MBR(master boot record) virus. have you tried scanning the drive?

go to www.seagate.com and get their diag program, i believe it is called SeaTools. they also have a reformatting/re-partitioning/zero-filling utility too - can't remember what it's called. if the diagnostics pass, then you can bet that its something to do with the data itself that is causing the problem (probably a virus). so, if it checks out ok in the diags then you should delete all partitions and zero fill the drive (that is, if you don't care about losing your data). the way you are describing it, the data may be screwed anyway.

i doubt the drive is trashed. i've had the same (or similar) drive as you for over a year without a single problem, and i have also owned several other older seagate drives that still run like champs.

hope that helps...