There's not much point in more than one person getting involved at this
stage of things. It seems he is attempting to rebuild the FAT. This may or
may not work, depending on the original cause of the problem. It won't work
if the problem is what I have guessed, because the LBA is different. This
means that the current relationship between a logical block of data (the
number that the operating system uses to address the disk sectors) and the
actual physical location on the disk where the data for that logical block
number is stored (the CHS value) is different than that which applied when
the data was originally written to disk. So even if you can reconstruct the
FAT, the numbers in the FAT will point to a physical location on the disk
that does not correspond to the data for that file. This means (for
instance) when the system attempts to read a directory to find where you
other files are, it will be reading some correct data and some wrong data,
and won't be able to make much sense of it.

I see some evidence that my theory might be right, but I don't understand
enough about that program to be able to confirm it, so it's still possible
that the searching and rebuilding you are doing might get that data back.
You can't do much more than stick with the procedure you have started.

Have you told him that someone else you have spoken with thinks that the
disk may originally have had a disk manager installed? That could be
something useful for him to know.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"mikesmith" wrote in message
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PART 3 OF 3

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