[lost]

I have had trouble with a Maxtor drive, which I would like to return to them for exchange, but first to get my data off. Every few months a partition becomes inaccessible. The drive is a 60 Mbyte drive so I partitioned it into 3 20 Mbyte sections. The win 98 system also has another 20 Mbyte Maxtor drive and a 10 Mbyte Quantum that have worked fine for years. So I fdisked and set up the partitions again. Actually, E: was ok, only needed to set up F: and G: again. But F: and G: are unformatted, and if I format I will lose the data. I'm guessing that the FATs are ok and there must be a way to regain access to the drives without formatting if only I really understood what I was doing. In fact, most likely there is a way to store the necessary boot records so if this happens in the future the drive letters could be restored. But I looked and searched and read and am still - lost-. Appreciate help with this. Thanks!

 

[Der Rabe]

This may work boot up using a windows 98 disk with fdisk on it. Then when you get to a command prompt type fdisk /mbr that may save you

 

[lost]

fdisk /mbr is the same as what I have done. That is, the fdisking part is complete, the dos partions are there, but windows says the drives need formatting.

 

[inbliss]

Lost, what did you end up doing? If you haven't done anything yet you could:

1. Since the Maxtor drive is malfunctioning let the shop be responsible for removing your data for you.

2. Have you gone into CD Creator or one of those programs to see if it will recognize the drives? If it does, then you can get your stuff off that way.

3. Get a program called "Go Back". It's alot better than "Restore" and the moment you notice you are having a problem it will very simply take your drives back to a time when everything was fine. It's an invaluable program. Check it out on www.cnet.com and check out the opinions from people who've used it. It's helped me a bunch especially when I've downloaded a program that's messed up my registry and things start malfunctioning.

Good luck.

Inbliss :brush:

 

[SPEEDO]

BTW Welcome to the forums lost..............