On a normal reboot, my 40gb slave drive has lost all partitions and now shows only as FAT instead of FAT32. I have a file restore program but no place to put 27 gigs of files....chkdsk and scandisk don't work. Is there any way to restore the drive to FAT32 without losing files or resorting to buying another HDD?
This is the 2nd time in a month this has happened, although on the first crash I only lost 1 partition. I'm running a P4 with Win98SE.
I've got to agree with compilerxp, this sounds an awful lot like a circuit board problem. Maybe a bad chip or cap. How old is the drive? Maybe it's still covered under warranty. I'm just concerned that it will happen a 3rd time to you.
Also I just remembered that there have been viruses that have deleted partitions. When was the last time you updated and ran your anti-virus? A virus attack can be very destructive, and the damage done to a system depends on the virus and what it was specifically designed to do. This damage can take the form of files being deleted or renamed, boot sector or partitions destroyed, and various other possibilities. It's worth a try
It does seem suspiciously like a virus....I have an updated version of Norton Antivirus and everything comes up clean though (I run a full system scan at least twice a week)
I managed to restore the partition table with Thiwankaw's tutorial at http://www.geocities.com/thiwankaw/articles/index.html
but there are still a lot of missing files.
The drive is brand new and still under warranty, BTW, so I may check that out. Trying to restore files with EasyRecovery now.
I have a new 120gig on the way, I'm going to install that with XP pro and then reformat both current drives after backups.
yeah, the C: is on another drive and it's fine, but the worst affected partition (i.e., unrecoverable files) housed my Poser program, which was also the only partition to crash in the last round. Because I download a lot of free Poser models into that directory, it would be logical that a virus would originate there.
But again, it would have to be some nasty that Symantec dosen't know about.
From everything you have said... I'd say 90% HD failure - because that is some severe stuff your talking about.
5% virus attack
5% very bad luck, or PSU...
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