C Drive Active but not formatted....????

[Fierce]

Ok, to make a long story short, I have a PC here, which has a 13 GB HDD, and Win98 is loaded on it. But, it won't boot completely thru. So, I took a 98 start-up disk, restarted the machine and checked the drive with FDisk....it said I had two partitions on the HD, partition 1 = 13 GB, partition 2 = 8 MB. Partition 2 was active and FDisk saw partition 2 as the "c" drive. So I changed the active partition from 2 to 1.....and got deleted partition 2. Now FDisk sees only 1 partition, which is active, but doesn't recognize it as the "c" drive. Also, FDisk sees the partition as a non-dos "type" format.

What do I do now to restore the drive so that it will boot, I don't want to lose the info and files he has stored on the machine. Thanks!

[gbbones]

Install the drive to another computer, copy all data from that partition and then FDISK it again. You'll have to reinstall the OS & apps but at least you'll still have the data backed up.

[gbbones]

Whoops. I missed the part about the "non-dos" partition. Is it possible that the drive was originally formatted with overlay software? Could it have been compressed? If so, the partition that was deleted may have been the host partition necessary to access the "non-dos" partition. If that's the case I think you're SOL.

[Chris_MacMahon]

put the harddrive in an xp or 2k box, use partition magic and fix it....
and also pray to the god(s) that you are all set...

[+Daemon+]

Id use norton ghost, ghost it to cd, then fdisk and get ride of all the partitions, then repartition format and install the os, then use ghost explorer to get your files back

[Chris_MacMahon]

good idea +Daemon+ i would of never thunk of dat....