Win XP pro FAT 32 probs

[suggy]

hi everybody.

recently took the step of upgrading from win 98 to xp pro about 3 weeks ago. fine. installed broadband last week with a few problems, but finally got it working. was browsing the net this morning when all of a sudden my monitor goes to standby, my comp freezes, and I get 'white noise' thru my speakers. I quickly reset, but when I got into windows I could not access my storage D drive. It says it is in RAW mode and needs formatting. the comp recognises it and gets its size 80gb correct, but cannot get into it. chkdsk on recovery console couldnt get in and said there were unrecoverable disk errors. however, using getbackdata I have discovered that the files are all still on the drive and that it is in FAT32 LBA mode. But i just cant access to them. it has been fine for 3 weeks and then suddenly does this . . . wondering if its FAT32 and NFTS problems as my boot drive is in NFTS. any ideas? thx

 

[0105Quircus]

Possibly. I suggest backup of important data (if possible - you may have to do it in DOS!!!), then FDisk with FAT32 and format, then convert to NTFS. There should be no conflict then.

 

[rannyman]

He is a story on how to recover the boot sector. May be posible fix

http://www.petri.co.il/recover_fat32_and_ntfs_partitions.htm

 

[suggy]

hey guys, been doing dome investigating. using getbackdata the D drive shows up as an 80gb physical drive but only a 9.86 logical drive. what does this mean?

 

[0105Quircus]

the logical drive is the partition created by fdisk or something similar. That is the only part that can be read. If you make a 10GB parrtition on a 80GB HDD and just ignore the rest, windows will only see a 10GB HDD. The rest will be useless until you re-partiton and re-format.

 

[JohnCitron]

Suggy,

Check your bios settings to make sure that something didn't get lost. I had that problem with my system a year or so ago. I have an IBM 18Gig in an older system, and for some reason, the LBA settings got confused in my bios during a lock up. After I redetected drive I was able to see the whole thing again; not just the first 9.0 Gig.

John

 

[tbirdkid]

1. Yes there is some compatability problems when booting to NTFS and writing to a FAT32 drive. Microsoft had this posted in some article, just can't find the number right now.

2. If you are using any dynamic drive overlay software, I have also seen this go awry with mixing NTFS and FAT32 drives in relatoinship to re-adjusting the size of the FAT32 drive.

3. Since you did not tell us what your hardware configuration is we can only make wild guesses to help you out.