PC Boot Problem

[pudgy]

Hi! This morning I was shutting down my computer and it froze, so I just pressed the start button as usual and thought nothing of it. Well, later in the day I started it up again and it gets to the Goback screen and gives me an error that I must restart my system because of a CPU problem (overclocking) or HDD problem. I get out my boot disk and go to Fdisk to see if my drive is being recognized, and it shows it as a "Non-Dos" partition. So after that I thought that the Goback may be creating the problem, and I do "Fdisk /mbr" to see if that would fix the problem. I then restart my computer and soon after that it gives me a message that "starting windows 98... type the name of the command interpreter" error. That left me in an unhappy mood. So I then got my other drive from my computer and hooked the good drive up as master and the bad as slave, but when it boots up, I go to My Computer and find that it shows no appearance of the bad drive.

Questions: Is there any way I can read the bad drive, so I can copy the necessary stuff off of it to another drive? Would the "Fdisk/mbr" further messed up my hard drive? (Would that cause my good drive not to see the bad drive?) Is there any recovery software that may help, if possible free/shareware?

Thank You Very Much,
Pudgy

PC Specs:
Windows 98SE (FAT 32)
Asus A7V Motherboard
AMD Athlon T-Bird 1 Ghz
Western Digital 40 Gb Hdd
512 Mb Ram (Kingston)
Geforce (Original) (Creative)
Pioneer DVD-Rom
Sony CDRW
3-1/2 Floppy
Soundblaster Live! Value
Ethernet Card

 

[Crashman]

I've seen that happen on good drives with VIA chipset boards! Something gets corrupted, the FAT table if I recall correctly, and the easiest thing to do is repartition the drive and format...but maybe you really DO have a bad drive?

<font color=blue>There are no stupid questions, only stupid people doling out faulty information based upon rumors, myths, and poor logic!</font color=blue>