One minutes it's there and the next minute it isnt!!

[ozrica]

I have a 10.2GB Fujitsu Hard Disk that up until this morning was working fine. The drive was split up into C: D: and E:

Turning on this morning and the system dumps out of Windows98SE claiming the drive is damaged.

I run scandisk which completes in seconds so I run FDISK and it claims the drive is 97% free.

I have loaded the drive onto another system and Windows does not register it.

Is there anything I can do to try and recover the data?

Thanks

[shamus]

Does the bios recognize it? If so make a Win98 boot disk and copy scandisk.exe and scandisk.ini to it. Boot from the floppy..at the A:\ prompt type- scandisk /nosave /autofix /surface c: and see what it finds...

[confus-ed]

Originally posted by ozrica
... so I run FDISK and it claims the drive is 97% free....

I'm a bit worried by this bit.... what do you mean you 'run fdisk' ? ... do you mean display partition info option within fdisk (is it option 4?) & it says 97 % free ? If so - what owns the other bit?

You can try "fdisk /mbr" (but hang fire with that), but the first thing I'd do is run the diagnostic utilities from fujitsu - they are tricky to find so here's a link

[PeLiGrOsO]

you got 3 partitions.. one of them is FAT32 for WIN98SE.. what are the onther 2 partitions ? what are they used for ?

[ozrica]

Thanks for the prompt replies.

Yes the BIOS recognizes the drive.

The scandisk which is running shows only 4 used clusters!!!!!

The C: drive has or had Windows98SE and Paint Shop PRO plus CDRW software.

The D: drive is used for movies downloaded from my digital camera.

The E: drive is used for photos downloaded from the camera.

The machine is not connected to the net and I don't use floppy disks.

Movies and pictures and backup to an HP CDRW drive and thats it!!!!!

[confus-ed]

so what owns the 3% ... & what did the diagnostic proggie say...?

...make a Win98 boot disk and copy scandisk.exe and scandisk.ini ...

you got 3 partitions.. one of them is FAT32 for WIN98SE.. what are the onther 2 partitions ? what are they used for

....You can scandisk to your hearts content but the partition info has gone screwy, so it doesn't matter what's on what partition, they are at the moment gone, Fdisk can see the whole thing ....

[ozrica]

I can't tell at the moment what the 3% is or the diagnstic because it is still running the scandisk.

I'll come back in a little while when the process has finished.

Thanks

Sorry.....didn't read the last two lines.

Back in a moment

[NooNoo]

Before you write it off try this Free recovery utility.

[ozrica]

The diagnostic Utility needs to save the log file to the hard disk and it can't.

I get an error code A198G8.

I assume this drive has had it?

Noonoo....I missed your post while doing this one. I will try what you have suggested...Thanks

[ozrica]

Noonoo.

I can't run that program at the moment but I did find Active Uneraser for DOS on the same site which is....as we speak try to find any deleted partitions.

I'll let you know what happens when it is complete.

Thanks once again.

[DocPC]

That is most likely one of the 300,000 10GB Fujitsu drives that are currently being RMA'd because of a bad chip on the controller board.

I have sent back over 100 of these myself. Usually I get a 20GB or 30GB in return.

Try the Tools from Fujitsu. They also have an online RMA form.

[Archer]

If you have broadband try this bootable CD here [220Mb ISO]: http://fire.dmzs.com/
[c/o tinyapps.org news letter]

FIRE is a portable bootable cdrom based distribution with the goal of providing an immediate environment to perform forensic analysis, incident response, data recovery, virus scanning and vulnerability assessment.
Also provides necessary tools for live forensics/analysis on win32, sparc solaris and x86 linux hosts just by mounting the cdrom and using trusted static binaries available in /statbins.

[ozrica]

OK.....the Active Uneraser for DOS found the three partitions but was unable to back up a copy of the MBR. As it's a beta/free tril it can't do much more!

I'm currently downloading the F.I.R.E iso which I will try.

Thanks for all your input and i'll update you all later.

[ozrica]

OK......The F.I.R.E software although impressive looking did nothing what so ever.

I tried PC Inspector File Recovery but found that did very liitle to help me.

Third time lucky I tried GetDataBack for FAT.......what an AMAZING piece of software. It's recovered 70% of all the data on the drive including all of the most important stuff.

You have to install it onto a good drive but considering Windows could not even see the Fujitsu this is fantastic. The entire process took about an hour but once finished you just copy the found data onto the good drive. It's easy to use and considering it only costs Euro 80.04 (£57.25) it's a bargain.

Thanks a lot to you all for the help and advice. These forums and their users are a god send.

Cheers

Stuart