Click to See Complete Forum and Search --> : Recovering Lost Files... Help Please


Legg83
07-30-2001, 10:46 AM
Ok, so I'm stupid. I thought it would be cool to install windows 2000 over the weekend. I was wrong.

Here is my setup. I have an 8 gig FAT32 (C :) partition, 3 gig Linux ReiserFS partition, a 64 meg swap partition. and the rest of my hard drive is a fat32 storage partition... which is about 8 megs.

Anyway, I decide to install Win2k. The version I have is not bootable, and has no boot disk utility. I have to install it from within windows98... fine, thats cool. It tells me it cannot upgrade, that it has to start out with a clean install. Ok, I assume your going to be formating my c: partition, go ahead, thats what I want to do.

During the install, it tells me something like.. 48 megs selected out of an available 800 megs of hard drive space. What? I have an 8 gig c: partition, i thought that was what you were storing to. So I exit out of the install. By this time, I don't think they have overwritten my mbr, so I can get into linux fine. I go to my d: partition, and i find a winnt directory, as well as some windows files in the root directory, and a program files directory. I delete these windows files. format c:, prepare for a fresh win98 install, enough of this win2k crap.

I get everything up and running in windows98, and then I realize that it can't find my d: partition.... reboot into linux, linux can't find it either.. fdisk says my partition tables are all messed up. Oh s***! Bye Bye 6gigs of precious mp3s.

But wait, I have Norton Utilities. Uh great, how do I use it?

Thats my question to you guys, after my depressing story... how can I resurrect my dead fat32 partition? I have a spare 9 gig hard drive sitting here, I would be happy with storing all my mp3s on that harddrive, and preforming a low level format on my screwed up hard drive.

Is there any hope? Are there any free faq's ore documents I could look at online?

I am open to ANY ideas. Please Help!!!

Thanks guys.

KT
07-30-2001, 10:52 AM
Here is a drastic solution. There might be better, easier ones.
Move all the valuable data on your drive to the extra HD. And then use fdisk to destroy and recreate ALL partitions. That will be the equivalent of wiping it clean and starting all over.

Hope that helps.

Legg83
07-30-2001, 11:08 AM
See thats just the thing. I know that I am going to do that after all my data is recovered. The problem is, I can't get linux or windows to see any of my files. I know they are still there, I haven't formated the drive or anything. I want to use Norton Disk Editor to recover lost directories, but I don't exactly know how to go about doing that.