Lost my Hard Drive

[pebe]

My main drive is partitioned to C, D, E.
C and D are Fat32. E is Fat16

A second drive was my old Dos6.22 drive and is Fat16. This shows in Windows as F. I have a Dos prog that uses a TSR and as Windows can't handle that, I boot to F from a Dos6.22 startup disk to run it. As it's the only Fat16 drive it Dos sees it as C. It ignores E presumably because it's the last partition.

I recently picked up the Parity virus, and Norton said it was in memory and shut down the machine. Got into the safe mode with Windows startup disk and used Norton2000 antivirus to clean it. It said the virus was in the boot files of C and F drives and it had cleaned them.

Now Windows is OK but shows no F drive, although it is shown in the bios setup. I booted from the DOS 6.22 startup floppy and that said there is no C drive. The floppy only has Config.sys and autoexec.bat on it and they point to progs in directories on the HD

What has happened? Is it fatal or is there any way I can retrieve the data from F?

Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[edfair]

fdisk /mbr to put a new boot sector. You'll have to find your original install set to find the utility. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.

 

[pebe]

Thanks edfair,

Would that be a Windows or Dos6.22 utility?

 

[edfair]

Actually it is both. But since you are critical with 6.22 I would suggest it since you can't inadvertenly get something wrong. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.

 

[pebe]

Thanks Edfair. I'm back!

Your suggestion of fdisk /mbr WOULD have worked OK, but I had finger trouble and took out the partitions of my main drive instead by mistake. I've only just managed to retrieve the Web settings and to salvage most of the data on my main drive that mattered.

I had backed up each drive on the other and didn't anticipate losing them both. I should have had more sense and backed up both drives to CD-R, which I have now done.

Thanks again, anyway.

 

[denutz]

This may be more of a question than a solution. My understanding is that fdisk /mbr will restore the backup copy of the master boot record. If this is the case, would it be restoring the infected boot record? I have been told to use fdisk /mbr fdisk /mbr (twice) to put a "new boot record on the drive. comments?

 

[edfair]

It puts a copy from the floppy to the hard drive. So unless the floppy was infected the hard drive should receive a good copy.
Better to use an original install version after a power down reboot.
Haven't seen any indication that any version up through 98SE would require using the command twice. Ed Fair
efair@atlnet.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.