I think I deleted my FAT

Computer was booting up Win98 and ran scandisk...I exited early, I believe during the check of the filesystem. Entire hard drive is reading as blank except for oen file....scandisk.log lol....Anyone able to help? This is very important as it is my friends computer and his mother is self-employed, her job depends on the info on the computer...Please help. Thanks in advance.

 

Computer was booting up Win98 and ran scandisk...I exited early, I believe during the check of the filesystem. Entire hard drive is reading as blank except for oen file....scandisk.log lol....Anyone able to help? This is very important as it is my friends computer and his mother is self-employed, her job depends on the info on the computer...Please help. Thanks in advance.

 

If indeed you did delete the file allocation tables, you could try a recovery program like the one found here:
http://www.partition-recovery.com/overview.htm

 

You will likely need to run some recovery software on the drive to try to recover the lost files.

Just do a web search for "File Recovery Software" and you'll get tons of hits. Many companies offer trial versions for you to try to see if the data can even be recovered.

http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuurstra/irecover.htm

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/download.htm

http://www.softwarepatch.com/software/filerecovery.html

http://www.data-recovery-software.net/





Rollin

 

Sounds like you killed it by being in a hurry. There was obviously a reason Windows chose to run Scandisk.

 

Hi,

Boot using a Windows 98 boot floppy disk. http://www.bootdisk.com if you don't have one.

At the a: prompt type exactly

FDISK /MBR

This command will copy the second copy of your Master Boot Record ie FAT table from the end of the hard disk and overwrite the original copy.

hth

Ceri

 

Hi and welcome.

I've merged both of your threads on the same subject matter. In the future, please post only once per problem.

 

For the record, I ALWAYS stop SCANDISK when I'm in a hurry. I've never had it do any damage like that.

 

I cannot see how stopping scan disk in the middle of a scan will erase the hard drive. If someone could explain how that COULD happen I'd appreciate it for future reference.
Something else must have been going on. Why was scan disk running at boot? That only occurs if the puter is shut down improperly. Sounds like Joshua's fat is gonna get deleted by his freinds mom when she finds out.

 

It had been shutdown manually instead of letting windows shutdown itself...But if it was something other than scandisk, why is the only thing on the harddrive the scandisk.log? I believe it destroyed the FAT and before shutting down wrote the log, thus the only file that is read is the log...Does anyone know a GOOD FREE program that can restore a file allocation table?