Could linux save my parents win98 box???

[cotfessi]

ok... there is a linux question in here so please bear with the little windows background info.

My parents have two hard drives in the computer running win98. My sister downloaded something, I think it was limewire. Anyways, when she went to install this little download, all hell broke loose. She said that the desktop icons vanished and the start menu was empty. Sounds like virus city right? She just turned it off. Now the damn thing wont boot up... it says invalid system disk... whatever!

Anyways, I put in a windows rescue and booted up, went to fdisk and viewed the partition info and it said that both drives had a "non-dos" filesystem. ouch! I said screw it to the first drive, formatted it and reinstalled windows. But the problem is there is some important data on drive two that I need to get back, but alas, windows won't recognize the drive.


here is the linux question:

I don't think that there was enough time for the entire second drive to be erased(20gb drive) when my sister screwed things up, so I'm assuming that there is still data on the disk... I wondering if I put this drive into my linux box do you think that I might be able to see the contents of it? In the past I've been able to see a windows partition...

Any thoughts?

[chikn]

Sounds like it corrupted your FATables. Hard one to recover from!!

[YaRness]

yes i would definitely try it. let me tell you why.

my old windows hard drive used western digital ez-drive as a disk-overlay so windows 3.1 could use the whole 4gig hdd instead of just 2 gig. i can't for the life of me get a normal install of windows, or a dos boot disk, or anything to read that drive unless the drive overlay program is loaded. however linux reads it just fine. i copied up all the data to another drive in linux, sometime this weekend i'll repartition/format/install on the drive and have a working windows install and still have all my old data.

if that doesn't work, then you may need some more complicated help, like a disk recovery tool or something. or just sit and decide how much stuff was replaceable and start from scratch.

[cotfessi]

thank you for the help.... I'm going to try it tonight...