Cont from security-Lost C drive and WIN98

[dcgofish]

Continuing from the virus forum, lost win 98 during
Norton AV installation. I can get in CMOS setup, looks ok.
I can boot from floppy, I checked fdisk, the partitions are there and size is right, primary (C) show 16bit FAT and D shows 32, is this normal? When I boot normally, (no floppy) I get invalid system disk please replace ect. From the Norton emergency/recovery disk when it checks boot record,cmos it says they dont need restoring.
When I look at C: with a dir comand I see 31 files listed, all approx 60,000 bytes, all with one or two SYMBOL file names, dates vary, but all times are 12:00. It also shows 1.9 GB free.
No directories show up. D drive looks intact. When I get back home I'll write down the sequence when I try win 98 start up disk. i booted so many times and got so many messags they all have run together. Will update later,trying to get online at home with another machine. DC

 

[Rollin' Rog]

Sometimes running the command sys c: from a startup disk will cure "invalid system disk" errors when they are due to corruption or loss of basic files necessary to booting.

However, while it might be worth a try here, the fact that your directory structure is not showing up correctly, suggests the need for a scandisk run. You can do this from DOS, there should be a copy on the startup disk and you can try the command scandick c:

Have it prompt for errors, rather than automatically fix. You want to know what is going on. I think the prospects are bleak though, and you are probably going to need to format that drive and reinstall.

 

[dcgofish]

For some reason sys c: transferred files, had tried it before and got cannot make directory entry, but it worked this time and I can boot to the c prompt now. Dir on C shows 473 files now(was 31),still no directories . Scandisk shows invalid file names contain invalid characters. Command.com is the only legible filename I see the rest are symbols.
Fdisk shows status A, Pri Doss 2047 mbytes, system is FAT 16
50%. Looks like some progress, where do we go from here?
Still not online at home so posts will not be to quick, have to go to work or school to post. Thanks DC

 

[Rollin' Rog]

I can't give a real explanation of what happened there, but either you've had a major disk crash or a boot sector virus. The fat 16 on one drive and fat32 on another is nothing I've ever heard of, and as far as I know it can only be corrected by doing a complete fdisk and repartition -- which of course means that everything will be erased. If there are any text files or documents on the D drive you might be able to save them to a floppy using DOS copy commands -- eg., copy d:\filename a:\

Other opinions or suggestions should certainly be welcome and explored...

Be sure to create a new, write protected boot disk for any repartitioning and formatting.

 

[dcgofish]

What is a directory entry, and can they be repaired or modified ?Scandisk is telling me they are invalid because of invalid characters Scandisk wants to relace them with chk0001 ect.
Glimmer of hope for some file recovery, now when I boot to C: I get the win 98 logo screen during boot. then c prompt.
Help with the dir entry dont know what they are. Thanks DC