HDD question revisited

[jharris]

I just got around to re-visiting my 'old' HDD issue. Here's my original post.

"What would it mean if a HDD was detected in BIOS but not seen by Windows or DOS? That's my situation. I have an old (3 years) WD HDD with my previous Win98 OS and all my files on it. Basically, it was my old everything. I tried accessing the data by setting the system up on IDE 2 all by itself and it's invisible in windows. I have tried all jumper configurations without success."

Well, I visited the WD site and downloaded and used their HDD diagnostic utilities. The HDD showed no errors. I suppose the WD diagnostics look for physical problems with the disk. Anyway, there were no errors reported.

Next, I put the old HDD back in the system as the only device (IDE 1) and booted using a boot disk. The computer reported that the C drive had a no FAT or that it might be corrupted. This makes sense because I can't see the contents of this drive through Windows or DOS. Is there a possible fix out there for checking the FAT and restoring it if need be?

One more question (another issue), is it a problem having two HDDs in a system with each having an active partition? Naturally, one is my C drive. However, I want to back up the C partition to the primary partition on my second HDD. This way I could back up my OS while using the 2nd HDD in my BIOS boot sequence.

Thanks again.

[glc]

You can try booting with the system floppy and doing a fdisk/mbr - then sys c:

[jharris]

Thanks. I'll try it when I get home today.

PowerQuest used to make Search and Rescue -- they still have Lost and Found out there -- to recover data from HDDs that weren't normally accessible. However, I'd like to find a solution that is already a part of DOS (if one exists). There're a lot of powerful commands within DOS that do the same things as pre-packaged software.

[Smoke24]

In your post you never mentioned wheather you went into the bios and let it detect your old drive. That may be your problem. If you run fdisk and or the WD utilities on it you may have wiped out your data. Some HD utilities will do that if you make a wrong choice from the menu. But Windows won't see your drive unless detected in the bios even though it may show at bootup.

[jharris]

Yes. I went into the BIOS and let it autodetect the 3300 MB HDD. That's how I knew the BIOS 'saw' it correctly. I'm still trying to figure out why I can access it in DOS (at least).

Anyway, this is just another one of those quirky situations. I'm sure I'll find a way to access the goodies on this drive. I still have to try the >fdisk /mbr suggestion.

[HAL9000]

Did your old system properly support the 3.3Gb hard drive? If not, it may have an overlay on it and cannot be seen by your current system because the drive overlay isn't loading on boot.

[jharris]

I'm not sure if an overlay was present because this HDD came from my first system (a purchase from Gateway). However, it was set up as a single partition. It's a WD unit, and an EZ BIOS disk was included with the system.

I've had this same issue happen in another system with another drive (a 6Gig WD drive) just last year. I got around that buy purchasing a copy of Lost and Found and a new HDD. Eventually, I loaded my OS on the new drive and recovered the data from the 6Gig drive and saved it on the new one. Over 95% of my data was recovered. However, that's a pricey solution because that particular software package get registered to a specific HDD by serial number when you run it. Basically, it's a one-shot deal.