Can't access hard drive...

[parallon]

I bought a Maxtor external fire-wire hard drive for backup purposes and I was playing around with Veritas Backup Exec 8.6, and trying to get it to backup to disk. Well, I had issues with a 5GB limit, but I will figure that out later. Well I went to erase drive from within Veritas, and after that, it told me that my drive was full, when it wasn't. I went to format the disk, and operation couldn't be completed. Now I can't access my drive at all. My label changed from 'Backups' to 'Local Disk'. I can't see the drive in FDISK either. It was previously a FAT32 partition. Did I mess up the MBR, if so, how do I go about fixing it. Once again, this is an external drive. Any help would be appreciated.

parallon

"I used to think that the more that you knew, the farther you would go, then I realized that the more that you know, the more they use you."

-Me

 

[zozuk]

did you fix this yet.

 

[parallon]

Actually, I did some further testing yesterday and noticed that the drive was not spinning up. So I just ended up just replacing it. Even when it was spinning up, I didn't know where to go from there. Didn't know how to fix the MBR if I couldn't see the drive. Any suggestions for future reference?

Parallon

"I used to think that the more that you knew, the farther you would go, then I realized that the more that you know, the more they use you."

-Me

 

[kcongdon]

You didn't mention an OS, so my advice may not work.

Before making changes to a system that may mess up the boot partition, make a boot disk if the OS supports it. Change the BIOS to boot from floppy. Then boot from the boot disk and then run a "fdisk /mbr."

With some OSes like NT and 2000, you can boot from CD and try to repair the installation.

 

[parallon]

Well, the OS on my primary drive is Win2k and the drive that I am having the problems with was mainly for backups, and it is firewire from a PCI adaptor, so I couldn't get DOS to recognise it. I was going to remove the drive from its case and plug it directly to an IDE cable when I noticed that it wasn't spinning up. Other than that, there is no way to access a PCI peripheral in DOS is there? What about with the Win2k boot disk? Are sufficient drivers loaded?

Parallon

"I used to think that the more that you knew, the farther you would go, then I realized that the more that you know, the more they use you."

-Me

 

[zozuk]

Parallon:
yes you can usually load DOS drivers for PCI devices. You need the DOS driver for the card off the cd or floppy that came with it or off the web site. (if they have one). We can load NIC's, parallel cards, modems, etc. You can manually run the driver, (usually a .com file) or have it load it automatically from config.sys. buy the way if the fire wire hard drive has data on it that you need, and won't spin up, put it in the freezer for a day or two, plug it in as soon as you take it out, sometimes a drive will then spin up long enough to ghost or get data off of it. On the MBR front, this is tricky business, should be done only after all else has failed. I once had employee that booted a NT 4 box with a 98 boot disk and ran Fdisk /MBR. that was the end of the NT 4 box and the end of him. It would be rare that if you can't see a secondary drive that it would be the MBR.

 

[parallon]

I have heard about the freezer trick before, but it spaced my mind. Thank you for all of your help.

Parallon

"I used to think that the more that you knew, the farther you would go, then I realized that the more that you know, the more they use you."

-Me