Lost: C drive, loving owners desperately want back

Fand

Friends have lost their C drive; when they boot from the system CD it says it can't see an operating system.

Ordinary kind of PC, with Win98 running. Was, at least.

Help!!

azezil

have u checked to see if any of the cables came loose inside??

po0k

Is it new enough?
In order for them to boot from the Windows98SE disc you have to tell the PC's BIOS to do so.
should be under the second heading of the left-hand column in an Award BIOS. Search around, should be pretty obvious.
Not all Windows discs are formatted for booting purposes.
Also, you say they lost the C: drive.
Is it actually physically reemoved from the PC or is it just b0rked?

Fand

Just b0rked. It's there, it has been touched and the very fingers inserted into its wounds, but Windows won't see it, and when the owners boot from the system CD they get a message that no operating system is present.

I haven't seen this myself - going to check it out on the weekend - but apparently it was present and working and orl korrekt until one of the kids played a game of some sort, and then there it wasn't.

Kix

In my experience a drive will generally make a lot of funny noises and generate a heap of errors before it fails completely.

Considering it disappeared "suddenly", the chief suspects would have to be:

1. Loose cables. Still #1 after all these years.
2. BIOS settings. Checking that the BIOS knows there's a primary hard disk installed would #2.
3. Straight in at #3, Remember "Wargames"? That film with Mathew Broderick? The hot new game the kids were playing was a funky little CLI number called "fdisk".

K

Fand

Yeah, but if I fdisk won't it nuke the stuff they've got on the hdd?

Kix

Noooo... I wasn't suggesting you fdisk it, I was suggesting that perhaps that the kids did. Anyhow, it's an outside possibility.

K

[Edit]
Actually, I think that if a partition has been "deleted" with fdisk and you recreate an identical partition all your original information will be intact. I know it's true with Linux fdisk but I'm pretty sure I've seen it happen with DOS fdisk. It's contary to what it says on the box though - all those dire warnings about the effects being unreversable. You never know, in a last resort...
[/edit]

po0k

1) like Kix said check the cables
2) if that doesn't work take it out, pop it on same IDE cable as your own hdd in your system and set the jumper on the back to slave. See if your windows can read it. If it still isn't readable, you've just excludd the possiblility of their mobo being scuppered. well done
Don't forget to put the jumper on the bcak of their hdd back to master when you're done with it.


kix, there have been one or two posts about that before i think, and i've read something on hdds too.
AFAIK windows and DOS don't delete anything. they just tell the OS that there's nothing there, then over write it when needed.
in this way, unless a piece of data has been deleted with a low-level uninstaller(in effect reforematting a part of the hdd) - scrubbing, you should still be able to recover the data.
i hope.

i also read in another article a year back that even when the platters of a hdd have been crunched up you can read the data off them, albeit in severely fragmented form.
hence the CIA never through out hard disks. they also have 'black' power boxes to stop info being sent down the power lines on the pulses of electricity. but that's another thread for another session.
Leased lines are funneh

Fand

urrk. How would I know what size of a partition had been deleted? Or, indeed, if there had been a partition?

WhiteWashMan

Originally posted by Fand
urrk. How would I know what size of a partition had been deleted? Or, indeed, if there had been a partition?

if there was no partition, then thit was never used.
ou must have a partition on a hard drive to use it.
ITS THE LAW!
if there was only a c: drive then you just use 100% in your fdisk, otherwise you will have to see how much was used for each partition.
a big wild stab in the dark.....

po0k

Bear inb mind this was probably a home PC, so the 100% was most likely the one.
Also, if someone did create a partition <100% they must surely ahve created a second one to use the rest of the space.

At this point it would be worth considering if there was anything important on the drive. Cos if there wasn't, then no problem anymore.

Fand

Important? Well, not the American war plans, but it's important to my friends: their home stuff, the kids' games, a couple of years of email and addresses... you know?

beaver

It's a bit unspecific to say it's been "lost". Did something happen to it? Did someone kick the box? Did someone open up the box? Could it have been a lightening strike? Was the disk making strange noises?

What error is given when you try to boot the machine?

-Ross

beaver

i also read in another article a year back that even when the platters of a hdd have been crunched up you can read the data off them, albeit in severely fragmented form.
hence the CIA never through out hard disks.

Sure, that's possible. You can send it to a data recovery company and it may cost several thousands of pounds depending on the damage...

-Ross

amen

just to be silly

1: Have you tried booting from a floppy. If you can boot from this can you access the c: drive. If you can the drive is ok you probally just need to re sys it. Try
sys c: a: (Make sure the floppy is write protected before doing any of this)

2: If you can ge to the c: drive and the above doesn't work try
fdisk/mbr from the c: prompt. (You may need to copy fdisk onto the floppy)

3:If you can't get to the C: boot into the pcs bios. If its an IDE you can try and set the IDE HD info to Automatic. I wouldn't mess around with this option though unless you are have tried everything everybody else has suggested