Damged FAT

My HD is failing. It will not boot. When I try to
reinstall WIN 98 it says that the FAT is damaged. How can
I fix the FAT to reinstall WIN 98, clone the HD to a new
HD and not loose my data?

Others might be able to tell you how to repair the fat. What I would do is
remove the old drive and put in the new one making sure that the jumper pin
is correct and that the drive is detected by the BIOS. Then use fdisk to
partition the new drive and then format the partition(s). Install W98 to
the new drive, install drivers as needed and then install your software.
Once everything is working correctly, put the old drive back in, make sure
the jumper pin is correctly set and that the drive is detected in the BIOS.
Then use Windows Explorer to transfer any of the data you need from the old
drive. Should the data not be accessible, you could try to repair the fat
(if anyone tells you how) or try retrieval softwa

IRecover, $50 to $100, The demo version gives an indication of what
information can be recovered from your hard disk but data is not recovered.
http://www.diydatarecovery.nl/~tkuur...x.htm#irecover If your data is
valuable, the author of the software provides tech support should you run
into problems.

Recover4All, $49, demo will retrieve files up to 10 kb and show what else
can be retrieved. Retrieved files are copied to another drive:
http://www.recover4all.com/

Restoration, Freeware, not tried:
http://www.webattack.com/get/restoration.html

For information on installing W98, go to:
http://home.satx.rr.com/badour/html/w98_restore.html
--
Regards

Ron Badour, MS MVP for W98
Tips: http://home.satx.rr.com/badour
Knowledge Base Info:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?pr=kbinfo

"Armando" wrote in message
...
My HD is failing. It will not boot. When I try to
reinstall WIN 98 it says that the FAT is damaged. How can
I fix the FAT to reinstall WIN 98, clone the HD to a new
HD and not loose my data?

On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 07:06:15 -0700, "Armando"
wrote:

My HD is failing. It will not boot. When I try to
reinstall WIN 98 it says that the FAT is damaged. How can
I fix the FAT to reinstall WIN 98, clone the HD to a new
HD and not loose my data?

Armando,

First I would boot with a Win98 Startup diskette and run Scandisk.
If no help try this:
The VFAT.VXD file is the Virtual File Allocation Table (FAT) Device
32-Bit File Access Provider (VFAT)(Base).
The VFAT.VXD may be corrupt so you might try restoring the file from
the CD. Boot with a Win98 Startup diskette and enter EXT.
Extract from=should be the Win98 folder on the CD.
Answer the prompts and extract to the WINDOWS\SYSTEM\VMM32
folder.
Don't specify a CAB file, EXT will search all the CAB files for
vfat.vxd.

If no help and no one provides a fix for the FAT and you need to
recover files from the HDD then Ron's suggestion for Restoration,
Freeware, is good, I have used it.
http://www.webattack.com/get/restoration.html

Read the Readme.txt file first.

Regards,

Bill Watt
Computer Help and Information http://home.epix.net/~bwatt/