partitions dissapeared, please help

[moracca]

hi. I'm new here. I have just recently started having a problem with my laptop computer. I previously had 2 partitions, c and d, with xp on C and vista on D. all of a sudden, with no warning, everything went wrong. It was working fine, and next time i turned it on, nothing.
"media test failure: check cable"
"operating system not found"
If i boot to a boot disk, it tells me the c drive does not contain a valid fat or fat32 partition.
may need to be partitioned
may be using 3rd party partitioning software
may have a virus

fdisk showed no partitions. I repartitioned, reinstalled win 2000 to a c partition. I attempted to install redhat9 (unsuccessfully -- froze on disk 2). Win2k was still working fine tho. I updated windows, and it told me it needed to reboot. on the reboot, same problem as before. What is going on here? do I have a boot sector virus? physical drive problem? what is the deal? and is there any way to get back without repartitioning and reformatting and reinstalling?

Another issue that may or may not be related: after installing 2k, i tried to install vista onto a d part. it said there wasnt enough free space for the temp files (needs 400mb). I had 15GB free on each partition. any ideas? I got a asimilar error when installing redhat. I dont know whats going on, but i'd appreciate any help. Thanks in advance.

//Moracca

 

[franklin97355]

Sounds like you are close to a hard drive failure.

 

[KenB]

moracca,
Try this, find out MFG. of HDD first then visit their WEB Site. Look for the HD Diagnostics and download. Make a bootable floppy and copy the files to floppy or use the diag software to build floppy if it does that. Then boot from the floppy and run the diag on the disk. This should tell you if the disk is bad. This works for 3.5" desktop drives and may work for Laptop drives as most are replaceable.

HTH
Ken

 

[jfc1003]

If you were running XP on C:, you were most likely formatted as an NTFS partition, in which case, the boot floppy will not see it. It only recognizes the FAT files. You need to boot to a Win2k or Win xp cdrom and go to the recovery console. Run chkdsk /r to find and repair problems with your hard drive.

Unfortunately, if you repartitioned using a fat32 utility, you probably lost your data.

Chkdsk will typically tell you if there is an unrecoverable error. If so, you are probably due for a new hard drive.

Of course, if you know for a fact you were running fat32 for Windows XP, none of this matters. Although chkdsk should still run and tell you what it thinks.

 

[moracca]

well i have a prog to let a 98 boot disk see ntfs. however, none of that matters, because now my bios isnt even seeing my HD! guess its time for a new drive. I appreciate your help.