Help with my hard drive

[Guest]

what happened is Napster crashed while i was downloading a file and I had to hard re-boot the computer. since then my system does not recognize my second partition and whenever i want to access it, the following message appers: "The disk in drive D is not formatted." i would format it, but i have over 30 gigs of important files on it. it also says something about no recognizable file system present of the drive. it used to be FAT32, now i don't know what happened and i don't know how to fix it. any help at all would be greatly appreciated. thank you in advance.

 

[ttaylor]

I had something similar happen to me a couple of months ago. The cost of having someone else attempt to recover my data was too high, so I searched Microsoft's site for information about the FAT32 disk structure. I then found an excellent shareware tool for low level disk editing called WinHex at <A HREF="http://www.winhex.com" target="_new">http://www.winhex.com</A>. It costs about $35 to fully enable it, but the cost is well worth it IMO. WinHex contains templates to help you examine and fix the master boot block and the partition boot sector, as well as the 8.3 and long filename entries in directories. Turns out there are backup copies of some critical information like the partition boot sector that you can copy over the damaged original. It'll take a little reading and some head-scratching, but there's a good chance you can recover your data. Sounds like all that happened was that your partition boot record was trashed. One important thing, though. <b>Don't let ScanDisk run until you're absolutely sure you've fixed as much as possible</b>. Otherwise, it might truncate some files and free some data you could have restored.

 

[Guest]

I agree that probably the partition table got corrupted in the MBR. Whether you will be able to fix that with the above mentioned program, I couldn't guarantee. But considering the cost of having somebody get that data off the drive, it's probably worth a try.

***check the jumpers 1st then check em again***