Dual Boot

[Sauron]

Hey,

I have two drives on my system, ones a 30 gig Western Digital and the other is a 80 gig Western Digital. Yesterday, I was trying to get a dual boot working, (windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE) Well, while both windows are working more or less, my second drive, the 80 gig while seen by Windows 2000 (Windows 98 can't see it because first of all its a huge disk, second its been formatted in NTFS) it won't access it. It just gives me "This disk is unformatted, do you wish to format it now?" And System Commander sees that its a 80 gig drive with 27 gigabytes used, as does the Windows 2000 boot up (setup). Any ideas?

James

[Mesaeus]

It is possible for a 80 Gig hard disk to be partitioned as FAT32, as long as you do it in W98 and not W2000. Now you say it's NTFS, and W2000 is treating it as an unformatted disk. Was it formatted recently, is it new ? Or was there data on it that you need ? When was the last time you could access it ? If it's a new one, you might first have to use the Disk Manager (run "diskmgmt.msc") to partition and format it. If it used to be readable, what exactly happened to it ? When did it start ?

[EzyStvy]

Only way 98 can see the 2000 drive is if you reformat and install 2000 on a fat32 partition.

[Sauron]

Well to start with, its a newer drive I guess, I bought it about 6-7 months ago, and it was working fine yesterday. I just don't understand why EVERYTHING ELSE BUT WINDOWS 2000 sees it, that and of course 98. And yes I do KNOW that 98 doesn't see anything unless its been formatted in FAT or FAT 32. Would reinstalling Windows fix it?

[Sauron]

*sigh* Well...according to the boot manager in Win 2k, it now says my bigger drive has been damaged or unformatted. Is there any way to recover my data without it all being destroyed? I have all of my documents among other things and yah..lots and lots of stuff

James

[Mesaeus]

Sounds like a corrupted filesystem, you can use file recovery software. You can try a free trial of GetDataBack ( get the NTFS version), which can do everything the full version can do except copy the recovered files, so you can test if the full version is worth the money. Also there's a fully free PC Inspector, but I have never used that one.

Don't write anything to that drive until you've recovered all that was on there, GetDataBack is your best chance at getting your data back.