FAT damaged can't run scandisk in win95

[UncleS]

Here's the quick version. My mom calls me because she got an error message on start up today. Apparently last night while she was on AOL ver 6.0 dad tried to make a phone call. This booted her off-line and froze the computer. She had to shut the power off to get the computer to shut. This morning when the computer was turned on, scandisc started to run because system shut down incorrectly. Scandisc says FAT damaged scandisc can not run. No other symptoms noticed yet. How serious is this? Can it be repaired?

Windows 95 - pentium II 233 - 112 M ram

[highrisemech]

I believe you can skip scandisk during boot up by hitting enter or something don't remeber exactly what keys you have to hit but if you look carefully you will see how. But anyway see if you can skip scandisk and get into windows. If you are sucessful then shutdown normally the restart. If it starts ok then run scandisk while in windows.

[UncleS]

Thats what I did. Exitted out of scandisc and let it boot. Scandisc still can't get past reading FAT. Is there any way to rebuild, repair or restore a bad FAT? There are no other problems so far. All programs seem to run the same.

[GaryRouth]

See if Scandisk will run in Safe Mode?

Seems like MaxBlast for Maxtors can redo darn near anything, probably the same for Seagate's SeaTools and Western Digital's DataLifeGuard tools. These can be downloaded from the drive manufacturer's websites. These diagnostic/repair programs run from a floppy that you create (from the program you download).

. . . Gary