extremly unusual hdd behavior

[mrant]

i have two western digital caviar 3400 hard drives. one just recently died on me, i think due to bad sectors. both drives are the same age, and i have windows 98 setup on the working drive and used to have windows me on the bad one. im trying to rescue some files off of the bad drive, as they are rather important.

bios can recoganize the bad drive, but windows and dos has trouble reading and writing to the drive. i tried hooking up the bad drive as primary slave and the good drive as primary master. bios detected both drives ok, but when i ran fdisk from a boot disk, i got a VERY unusual result. there were two drives, which is right, but both drives should be 4 gig each, but the table said there was one 4 gig as slave and a 500mb drive as master. this scared me.

if anyone has any ideas as to what happened or any ideas on possible data recovery, id be very grateful for your input

--MrAnt--

 

[edfair]

Fdisk is depending on a media byte to define the type of file system. I suspect, but don't know for sure, that your problem is that you tried to look at the ME with a 98 fdisk and that the filesystem wasn't recognizable. How about trying with a ME fdisk and look again. Or look separtely with the boot disk that gave the error and see if it changes when looking at a single drive. Ed Fair
unixstuff@juno.com
Any advice I give is my best judgement based on my interpretation of the facts you supply. Help increase my knowledge by providing some feedback, good or bad, on any advice I have given.

 

[ectimo]

WinME is bad OS, it has a very poor HDD management... (not to mention that it is unstable, unreliable, poor memory management, and so on) that is most likely why your HHD with ME failed while 98 still works fine...
Anyway, try connecting the bad drive as secondary (slave) drive, load win98 off of the good drive... DO NOT FDISK drives as this will only destroy data on them!!!
if the win98 sees the bad drive, copy the date from it to the good one, and that should be good enough...
If the win98 doesnt see the drive or information on it, you may try some tools off the web... download.cnet.com has a load of them... search for "file recovery"... if that doesn't help, then friend with more knowledge and Win2000/XP or Linux might help.... otherthan that... there are companies that will recover the data, but that costs $$$... usualy not worth it...
I hope this helped a bit!
Please send feedback!

 

[FatesWebb]

yeah and make sure it isnt setup as something weird in CMOS like non-LBA modes... js error; 67 on line; 36 of signature.class