Totally destroyed File system

[Pantion]

Well it should have happened sooner or later, but well...

I was running win98 on FAT32 and decided to install WinNT. Since I have all in FAT32 and NT can't read it, I used Partition Magic 4 to create and reduce the partition from the whole 3gigs to 1.5gigs and leave the rest to NT.

Well I ran Norton Disk Doctor to check for errors and used partition magic just to resize and convert from FAT32 to FAT16. It cutted and began to convert to FAT16 and on 80 something % showed an error and rebooted. After that I only get the preboot screen... the one of the bios that shows up checking mem, hd, etc. before the "Startin whatever..."

It doesn't matter if I have to change the HD, but there is only 1 file that I want to recover. Is there anyway I force the computer to boot since I tried all types of combinations: floppy, CD-ROM, PCMCIA, etc. and it nevers enters not even checks any drive. I can enter the bios and runned the diagnostic progs and the HD tests OK as all other components.

Any chance of getting that little 36KB file?
Its a IBM Thinkpad 380ED (a bit oldie) P166MMX, 80MB ram, 3GB HD and Xircom CEM56 Modem/Net card.

[This message has been edited by Pantion (edited 09-06-99).]

[BBA]

Sounds like the wrong partition is set active... easy fix!

First you need a bootable floppy disk, with fdisk.EXE from win95b or later. You need to copy FDISK.EXE from the Windows/command directory of the same version OS the floppy is made from onto the floppy.

Boot with the floppy disk and run FDISK.EXE and select the option to set active partition. Then set the FAT32 partition active.

Escape from the FDISK program and Reboot!

BBA

[Pantion]

Sorry... forgot to mention one little but very very very important detail.

Can't boot from a floppy, cd, pcmcia or HD. I tried changing the startup options in all posible single and multiple combinations.

And just when it finishes checking the mem the HD read/writte light stays on and stays on, and on, and on... and stays there!! Pretty strange for the bios not to boot from the floppy or anything else even when I choose not to use the HD. But that is the thing... I passed more than half an hour braking me head what could posible made the laptop act like that... maybe partition magic damaged the very begining of the HD on sector 0, but that shouldn't be any obstacle for not booting from a floppy.

Anyone has a clue or suggestions on this peculiar behavior?

Really want to get that small Word file, got backup, but I didn't update it for 2 days and don't want to try to remeber everything I wrote there.

[Rookie]

Not sure how much this will help you, but I lost the use of the floppy on my old biostar 8500 pent133. Heat damage due to cpu fan quiting. I wanted to flash the bios to see if that would fix it. Well the floppy controllers died- so I put in an old ISA ide card that belongs to my 486, went into bios and disabled the onboard floppy controller and vioila! Flashed the bios from the floppy via that route. Isa Ide cards can be bought for about $20-$30 US depending on retail or show price.
Unfortunately the over heat damage is still there, I get wierd errors after having it run for more than an hour.
Hope that helped
Rookie

[krusty]

You could put that drive into another computer as a secondary drive & read it from another windows fat 32 system

K

[Pantion]

Thanks for all the break throough, but there is still something that you aren't considering. It isn't a desktop is a Laptop.

The ide controller idea is great, but I don't think there are any for PCMCIA. Beside even when I disable the HD it still won't try to read any other drive.

The most viable way would be putting the HD as secondary. If the Laptop's HD exactly as a IDE HD of a desktop then I will do it, but need to know if it is.

[nilknarf]

There are adapters available that allow you to connect a laptop drive to the IDE controller in a desktop. Your laptop drive is probably a 2.5" drive. You can get an adapter for parallel port or for internal IDE. I would tell you where, but it has been a while since I needed such an adapter.

Your other options include

Sending the laptop to IBM
Sending the HD out for data recovery (although this is very expensive)

If you send your laptop out for repair, be sure that they are aware of the exact file which you are trying to recover!

You might just try to rebuild the file. And, as long as a low level format has not been done or the HD has not been 0ed, there is always a way to recover the data, It's just a matter of how much T&M you want to spend recovering a 36KB file!

Hope this helps!

Good luck, I know how you're feeling, I've been there before. Fortunately, I had corporate resources which most people don't have.