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Old September 28th 17, 04:43 PM posted to microsoft.public.win98.gen_discussion
Auric__
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Posts: 38
Default Cant access some of a Partition

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).

--
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