Can't access data on secondary hard drive 1

[queyne]

I was having some disk write errors. I ran Norton Utilities and it said there were some FAT problems. After letting Norton Utilities try to fix these, I can no longer access the drive at all. I downloaded a tool from Maxtor to diagnose drive failure, and it says the drive is still good. Didn't low level format.

Bios recognizes the drive. It shows up as drive d in windows 98 SE, but if I try to click on it, it says

"D:\ is not accessible
A device attached to the system is not functioning"

Properties shows both used and free space as 0 Bytes.

In DOS, I get Abort, Retry, Fail message.

Ironically, I was preparing the drive for backup (getting rid of redundant files and so on) when this happened. It's personal, so I can get by without the files, but many will be irreplaceable.

 

[queyne]

I forgot one other thing. Fdisk reports the following re: this drive.

Partition=D:1 ;Status = A ;Type = PriDOS ;Volume =;
Label =; MBytes = 57254; System = Unknown; Usage = 100%

(Volume and label are blank)

 

[wolluf]

Have you another machine you can try slaving drive too? (just to see if that can read it). Did the drive have any overlay software used to set it up (eg, too big for bios)?

You could try a data recovery program (don't know how good they are when windows can't read the drive) - free one here

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

- lots of others (free & commercial), use Google to find them if necessary.

 

[queyne]

I poked around on this site, and found reference to PC inspector. That managed to save most (not all, but at least most) of the files I was most concerned about.

The drive actually still seems to be sound--I just ran into some problems, and was in a hurry (1st mistake), so let Norton's do whatever it wanted, which just ended up trashing some key areas of the drive.

 

[wolluf]

I have to wonder about Norton's software (the stuff that's supposed to look after and fix problems on your PC) - I see so many posts like yours, I think it should have a PC health warning on it!