2nd HDD Directory corrupt??

[ProtocolDroid]

I have a WD-caviar 2gb hdd that contained an old win98 OS.I put a new 40 gb Maxtor in the box and successfully installed Win2kPro on it,then i put the old 2gb back in on a seperate IDE channel. OK....heres the interesting part;the 2 gb hdd is recognized by the bios,OS,Diskmgmt.mmc but when i try to access the files to retrieve some data the windows explorer will only let me go 1 layer deep into the directory....i.e. i open windows folder then try to open any others inside i get an illegal operation error...same with most of the other folders on the root dir. of the drive.The ones that will open wont allow opening of the files inside such as .jpg and .bmp or any other recognized format.It usually crashes the whole machine when i try to open any pic or even text file from the hdd...i would format and roll on but i have data i need to retrieve from this drive...any ideas??

 

[wolluf]

Is 2k on ntfs or fat32 filestore?
If its fat32, you could boot machine from a win98 boot floppy and use xcopy to copy files from old to new drive (or boot into win98, if still usable - swap boot drive in bios to do this - and copy from win98 to 2k drive).
Which makes me think - have you tried to access it from command prompt?

If its ntfs, have you tried recovery console (to see if its copy command can access more than first level).

Have you tried selecting everything in explorer (ie top level) and then copying to a folder on 2k partition? (so you are not explicitly accessing lower levels).

Data recovery tool might be useful - free one here

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

 

[fatmander]

As wolluf said, whats the file system,FAT16/ 32 or something else,
Try the disk managment utility in computer managment in Win2k and it will tell you
1/Is there any drive compression on the drive, or is compression dead since the days of Win95?
2/Have you tried xcopy through DOS
3/ Have you tried to run anything like partition magic on the drive as this could give an answer as to why the drive doesnt work.
4/ What does scandisk have to say?

Can the 2GB drive be used as master, made to boot to win98, and copy the files onto the 40Gig slave(if it was formatted to fat- not ntfs)
YOu could also Image the drive(onto another drive you don't have), and see if it gives the same problem.