HD lost it's partitions.... Theoretical ideas?

[IronHawk]

I have a WD Caviar 28400 hard drive in a Tyan MB/Duron/64M SDRAM Win ME environment. Have used for like 6 months, done software testing for my job, etc. I also use good A/V software and update regularly. The other day the thing froze up in the middle of a session, and when I rebooted, it couldn't find the OS. I renbooted with the ME startup disk, and found that the partitions were just gone! No "non-Dos" stuff aor anything. I have repartitioned and tested the drive and it appears fine. Any ideas what could have happened?

Thanks
MB

[daveleau]

The MBR (master boot record) was probably corrupted somehow. I would have tried to do this in DOS:

a:\FDISK /MBR

This will rebuild the 9x kernel's MBR. I would scan the surface of the drive for errors, as this is also a sign of drive death.

Good luck
Dave

[IronHawk]

Thank you very much. I will keep that in mind.... Never thought to check out the switches for fdisk.....

CYA
MB