From: Bill Morrow (penzance_at_gate.net)
Date: Mon Feb 14 2000 - 02:26:55 EST
Peter..
you probably did..
not exactly sure what you did, but if you ran fdisk, in order to destroy
anything, you would have had to tell it to delete the current partitions..
and it does not make this easy, asking for constant assurances from the user
that the user is NOT doing something he will later regret..
apparently, you did something that you now regret...
i suggest that you take a look and HOPE that the MBR and partition table are
not erased...
merely invoking FDISK will NOT automatically destroy the partition table and
master boot record..
so, if these are now gone, i doubt it WAS, in fact, FDISK..
SO, take another look..
dredge up whatever you have in the way of HDD recovery utilities..
(beware of some of these as they only make things worse)
you might try FDISK again and LOOK, but do not change..
meantime, if someone will send me that old IBM utility that will take a
diskette image, make it into a file, then reconstruct it on a floppy, i'll
make a boot floppy for peter and e-mail it to him..
(i forget the names)
Peter Wennersten wrote:
> The novice is at it again!
>
> Trying out the tips I got in the last few days (thanks everyone) I was
> still not successful, so I became a bit reckless (at 2AM) and tried
> every *.EXE on the recovery boot disk hoping to bypass the recovery
> shell/program and start the reinstall process without the recovery
> shell.
>
> Not knowing what it would do, I typed FDISK and when I realised it was
> the partitioning program I aborted it. But it was a bit late. Now when I
> try to boot it says 'Operating system not found' and I have to insert a
> diskette and boot from the A: drive (still cannot boot from CD drive)
> upon which the message appears 'C: contains no valid FAT or FAT32
> partition'.
>
> Does this mean that all files that were on C: and D: (the two hard drive
> partitions) are gone or is there a way to recreate the FAT? (I backed up
> my most important files before starting to poke around like this but not
> everything. Those files are not important enough to buy recovery
> software but if there is a way within DOS I wouldn't mind trying it
> out.)
>
> /Peter
>
> --
> Peter Wennersten
> Researcher at the Dept. of Social & Political Sciences
> European University Institute
-- Happy trails...** Bill Morrow ** :-) WEB page http://thinkpads.com e-mail: bill_at_thinkpads.com, penzance_at_gate.net
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