Help can't access Drive on Win 98 partition.

[jeresimo]

Hi! My friend reformatted her drive C: under Win 98. Now she could not access the other partition on drive D: with a msg: "Device is not working properly", after she reinstalled Win 98 in C drive again. What shall we do so as she could access her files? TIA.

[Cricket]

Pull the hard drive out of her computer and put it in another one to see if you can access the hard drive there.

Cricket

[TwoRails]

Sounds like she may have hosed the drive... I'd try booting up with a floppy system disk and see if both drives can be found or not.

TwoRails

[jeresimo]

Thanks fellas, but she got only ONE HDrive with two partitions
C and D drive letters. The Drive C was formatted and Win 98 was reinstalled and no probllem there. The Drive D was not formatted, but she can not access it.

[Kubie]

jeresimo,

The Drive D was not formatted, but she can not access it.

D: has to be formatted for 98 to see it.

Carl

[GaryRouth]

I'm going to guess that you meant to say "drive D wasn't re-formatted at the time Win98 was installed on partition C".

It sounds like she has files she wants to access on the D partition. Do you know what file format the D partition is formatted with? Win98 won't be able to see information on an NTFS formatted partition (used in WinNT/2k/XP).

To see those files, she'll need to slave the drive in an XP machine & make backups. Reformat the drive again with FAT32, reinstall win98, and restore the data to the D partition from backups.

Best of luck
. . . Gary

[jeresimo]

Sorry fellas for not making my post very clear. Here is what I meant. at first her HDrive has a Win 98 on it and she made two partitons C and D. Everything was smooth for a long time, but then when her computer started to go slow she reformatted the C drive where Win 98 resides, leaving drive D: intact 'coz she got so many files and mp3's in there. Then she reinstalled Win 98 on Drivve C: again. No problem on intall 'coz everything went smooth and loaded all her applications back When she tries to access Drive D: that's where the msg poped up saying "Device is not working properly". Hope this is clear now. TIA.

[andyms18a]

my first guese wood be when the drives wear partitiond and formated origanley some type of drive overlay software was used when you reformated the c drive it has deleated the overlay software so d has inefect lost its partition and mbr info you can try partition magic and see if it can fix the partition or copy the date to the new c partition or get some file recovery software and try that

[GaryRouth]

I think it's a good possibility that andy's scenario reflects your situation.

See if your friend can remember:
1) What make/model hard drive does she have?
2) When she first installed it, did she need to use MaxBlast (Maxtor drives), DataLifeGuard (Western Digital), or SeaTools (Seagate) to help the older motherboard use all of the large hard drive?
3) If she can't remember either 1 or 2, does she remember seeing a banner at startup "Initializing EZ-Bios"?
4) What commands did she use when reformatting the C partition? [Did she only used "format", or did she use "fdisk" then "format"? ...or?]

If she didn't use fdisk, and if she originally had used a drive overlay program, she might be able to fix things by reinstalling the drive overlay (though she might end up having to reformat/reinstall the C partition again). She has the best chance of recovering the files if she tries the same drive overlay program that she first installed (though Western Digital's version of Ez-bios can convert some others).

There are some excellent support pages for most overlay programs at the hard drive manufacturer's sites. Usually, do a search under the software's title (MaxBlast, Ez-Bios, etc).

I have a couple of the Western Digital links handy:

Convert Disk Manager Partitions to EZ-Bios Partitions
http://support.wdc.com/faqs/software...ls.asp#convert

Data LifeGuard (& EzBios) FAQs
http://support.wdc.com/faqs/software/dlgtools.asp

See if any of those help
. . . Gary

[jeresimo]

Thanks again fellas. I told her to use GETDATABACK recovery freeware. Now. she was able to access the Drive D with it and got some files back, but not all Some folders were empty too. We are thousand miles far away. So that's the only help I could give her. OH well.