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re: data recovery Tuesday, March 28, 2006 at 7:53 am Posted by Jack Gulley (5917 messages posted) Don't let the XP machine near that drive until you have recovered everything you want off of it. Use the Windows 98 machine only, as it should be able to read it. As the BIOS sees the drive, you know the basic disk drive hardware is working. That is good. It most likely means that the disk drive partition information is damaged. The best way to handle this is to use a Windows ME startup or boot diskette. Hope you have one. You can make one on any Windows ME system in Add/Remove Programs icon in Control Panel. Use the Startup Disk tab. The Windows 98 startup diskette will work, just the Windows ME one is much better. Make sure the drive is jumpered as the IDE Master and the ONLY disk drive plugged into the system and boot from the startup diskette (test it on your working Windows 98 system first). Once booted to the DOS prompt, try running SCANDISK C: to see if it can access the disk drive. Most likely not as windows can not see it, then DOS will not. Next run the DOS FDISK program (answer Yes) and select the option 4 to display partition information. If it does not show this, then the master boot record is damaged and there may be no hope for recovery without advanced tools. At this point you can exit FDISK and run it to repair the master boot record. Run FDISK /mbr command. This only works on the C: disk drive, as master and why you want to try this with only that drive connected to a system. With luck, it will allow you to reboot and access the drive. To do data recovery if that does not work, requires programs like Norton's Disk Doctor or others, and these require some degree of experience using them. [Reply or follow-up to this message] re: data recovery Wednesday, March 29, 2006 at 6:32 pm Posted by beaujames (2 messages posted) Thanks for the advice Frank. I don't have a startup disk for Windows Me, so tried the 98 startup. No success,"Disk Failure" message. Gave command.com a try as well; of course DOS did not see the drive. Learned something though, my friend who asked me to try and recover the files apparently had bad info; she was told her board was cooked by a surge. Maybe it was, but the drive apparently was damaged too. I do have Norton, tried that but since Windows didn't see the drive neither did Norton. I guess I'll try to see if I can get a hold of an ME startup or run Norton from CD or diskette. [Reply or follow-up to this message] Tip: Use one of the [Reply or follow-up to this message] links above to add a message to this thread Search this forum Start a new thread on a different subject Report abuse of the forum Return to the Windows Me Discussion Forum