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Old September 28th 17, 06:02 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
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Default Cant access some of a Partition

On Thu, 28 Sep 2017 15:43:15 -0000 (UTC), "Auric__"
wrote:

anonymous wrote:

It appears that one of my hard drives is going to crap. It's my second
(slave) drive, which has 3 partitions on it. 120gb IDE drive. Formatted
to Fat32. This is a Win98se computer.

Oddly, from Dos, I can see all the folders in that partition. From
Windows, I only see about half of them. This partition contains storage
files. Most are backed up, but there is a large folder containing some
valuable info that I do not have backed up. In fact I first noticed this
problem when I wanted to backup that folder to am external HDD.

I ran Scandisk, first the fast method, which told me to use the thorough
method. I ran the thorough one, which took hours. While running, it got
to one cluster and said that one can not be fixed. The rest of that
partition tested ok.

When scandisk ended, it said that it could not fix that one error, and
when I tried to close Scandisk, Windows locked up.

[snip]
Note: I am not a Linux user, but maybe I could connect this drive to
another computer and boot that computer with some smallish linux such as
Puppy Linux, from a bootable USB. I have used that method to retrieve
data from an XP drive, after the motherboard failed, but I never tried
it to retrieve data from a failing HDD.


That's the exact method I would suggest, although there's no real need to
use a separate computer: connect the new drive and the old drive to separate
controllers (not master and slave on the same controller), boot from USB (or
CD if the computer is too old), copy.

But I'm not entirely convinced the drive is failing, aside from that one bad
cluster. If you have a util that can check the SMART data (most modern
BIOSes can) I would start there. You could also connect it to the XP machine
and run chkdsk on it and see what happens. Or, with that same bootable Linux
USB/CD/whatever, run fsck.vfat on the bad partition (i.e. 'fsck.vfat -aft
/dev/hdb1', where the switches tell it to a: automatically repair the
filesystem, f: salvage unused cluster chains to files, and t: mark
unreadable clusters as bad).


The computer is too old to boot from USB. (from the year 2000), and it
dont have a CD drive (I have no need for CDs).

I dod have another desktop computer that has XP installed. But that is a
much newer machine and it has some other kind of drive, (not IDE). I
think it's Sata or something like that. So I dont think I can just plug
this IDE drive into it.

My guess is that the easiest way is to buy one of those kits that allow
any hard drive to be converted to an external USB drive. I plan to order
one of them from ebay today.

I dont think the whole drive is failing either. It has 3 partitions. G:
H: I: (H: and I: work fine). But I think once a drive starts to show bad
clusters, it's starting to fail, and I should replace it.

What sort of utility will check SMART?

The Scandisk.log file shows the bad cluster is NOT being used, so
nothing should be lost. I can only figure the problem is in the MBR.
Just for the heck of it, I loaded Partition Magic, and PM showed that
partition to be filled to capacity. Yet, going to My Computer and
showing Properties for that G: partition, shows it's only half full
(which I know is true). It's a 50gb partition and contains about 24gb of
data.

Although I can boot to linux on a machine that boots from USB, I get
completely lost when it involves the linux command line. I can only do
the basic GUI shell.

I found that I can copy my data from that bad partition to another
partition, using DOS, but the folder I need to save, contains several
hundred sub folders. I dont mind copying each one folder by folder, but
all long filenames are going to be lost, and that will mean hundreds of
hours spent to rename everything back to normal. The data is very
important, so if I must do that, I will. Then too, I will have to do it
in segments, because no other partition (on the other HDD) is big enough
for this data. But I can do part of it, and then dump that saved data to
an external drive.

It's amazing how quickly one or two bad clusters can totally screw up a
whole drive or partition. I'd think that scandisk would have enough
sense to mark these bad clustera as BAD, and leave everything else
intact. I guess scandisk is not a very useful utility.

The Scandisk.log file shows this:
(Copied from Scandisk.log)


Drive G_120 (G contained the following errors:

Error reading your drive.
ScanDisk may have corrected this error when it performed a surface scan.
However, other errors may remain on your drive.
Resolution: Retry the read

Error reading your drive.
ScanDisk may have corrected this error when it performed a surface scan.
However, other errors may remain on your drive.
Resolution: Ignore this error and continue
Results: Error was not corrected.

ScanDisk could not properly read from or write to cluster 57856.
This cluster is currently unused.
Resolution: Repair the error
Results: Error was corrected as specified above.

ScanDisk could not properly read from or write to cluster 135122.
This cluster is currently unused.
Resolution: Repair the error
Results: Error was not corrected.
Results: Correction failed

ScanDisk found errors on this drive but did not fix all of them.