[SOLVED] Lost HDD Partition - Disaster

Hello all.

I'm using Win 98 se and have an 8GB HDD partitioned into 4 x2GB drives. Today Windows suddenly shut down as I was working (no big deal - it's done it often enough before) but on rebooting I found I'd lost all partitions except the active one.

I can't see them under DOS's FDISK either. How can they have just disappeared? Have they gone for good or is there anything I can do? I'm absolutely desperate and would be most grateful for any help.

 

Could be a virus has messed up your master boot record. I have never heard of extented partitions just going away after a reboot....something else is going on here. Were these partitions on another drive or were all partitions on one drive. Too weird!!

 

There isn't a way to recover data on the lost partitions. You'll have to restore it from backup.

 

Got my hands on a fantastic piece of software by Ontrack called "Fix-It Utilities". It looked at the free space on my drive and found all my files - amazing! Best £40 I'll ever spend. So easy to use as well.

I've still no idea why it happened though - very strange.

 

That's great! I'm glad you found that software. It's still best to back up your data though. Even the best utilities can fail sometimes, but I'm happy it worked out this time.