help - windows disk/partition gone....

robnye

switched my home pc on last night........... got screen 'windows wasnt started properly'
pressed enter....... blue screen of death flashed past very quickly.

booted form a floppy..... found only one disk showing.

I have a 40gb disk with 2 partitions - windows/data
i back up 'my documents' to data (never got round to moving it)
now cant see windows disk/partition - windows wont start.
last back up i have is mid april...... eldest daughter is distraught as she had a lot of end of school photos on it.

i have put a sconed disk in (which had windows on it), but still only the data disk is showing
any ideas how i can recover the disk (preferably with as little cost as possible)

jakemuk

data recovery where in country are you ?

tewboss

I was going to suggest using a Linux boot CD to see if you can recover the partition but you will need somebody to download the CD image and burn a CD for you. Cheaper than paying to data recovery.

albertross_2

What operating system is it. What is the floppy disk that you are using. Do you have original windows CD's. Does safe mode work?

robnye

i am on the south coast

i have standard win 95/win 98 boot up floppies.

the windows xp cd i have is an upgrade only ( i think - i will have try booting from that tonight)

albertross_2

Is the problem PC XP????? or 98 or 95??

If it is XP,with NTFS drives, the 9x boot floppy won't recognise it ..

try booting to floppy and run ntfsdos if that is the case.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.html

http://www.bootdisk.com/

Toxteth_OGrady

Try booting from your XP CD and do a repair install.

:cool:

TOG

robnye

albertross wrote:

Is the problem PC XP????? or 98 or 95??

If it is XP,with NTFS drives, the 9x boot floppy won't recognise it ..

try booting to floppy and run ntfsdos if that is the case.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsDos.html

http://www.bootdisk.com/

its windows xp

yes i know win 95/win98 wont see ntfs

i ran fdisk, but it didnt show in there either (mind you that was after using the win95/98 boot disk - would that have made a difference?)

Toxteth_OGrady wrote:

Try booting from your XP XD and do a repair install.
:cool:TOG

thats on my list to do tonight as well.... many thanks

robnye

update:

tried to boot from windows xp cd..... didnt work.

put a second hard drive in, (with windows 98) all sorts of problems i e missing drivers....... rebooted into dos

ran ntfsdos...... and voila the missing partition has appeared......

any ideas what i need to do now.....?

robnye

albertross wrote:

If I understand correctly, you have a windows c: drive that won't boot, and a d: drive with an out of date data backup on. Your upto date data is on the unbootable c: drive under mydocs?

yep.... got it in one

You could have a go at repairing XP,

tried this, but my windows xp disk is knackered

I'd backup your school photos before doing anything else.

yep, the absolute minimum i want is to copy of the 'my docs' folder to a 2nd physical disk (with windows 98 on), then i can start again with the whole disk

Try safe mode if you haven't already (F8 at bootup)

i cant it wont give me the choice.

get the 98 disk to work by installing just enough drivers to get going, install this (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/NtfsWindows98.html) and write the data to CD (you will need Nero or Easy CD), or USB key.

this looks like the exact thing i am looking for. I will try this tonight, fingers crossed (n toes)