A physical drive is unaccessible, it says it needs formatting ? First the bleeding moniter blows now this!

Hi norfarm,

Take a look here to get your data back: http:Q_20827883.html
that's the most important thing, afterwards we can look at the mouse.

Greetings,

LucF

I would suggest taking the 18G out and trying to boot on the 8G.  If it won't boot, get a 98 boot disk from www.bootdisk.com and boot on it.  Can you see the data now?
You may need to change the master/slave settings to get it to recognize the disk.  If you can see the data now put the other drive in as a slave and boot again on the floppy and copy the data from the 8G to the other drive.

ok thx guys, hold on for a bit while i try some ofthose suggestions. Am downloading pcinspector first up ! I'll get back to you later. thx again.

Good luck :)

not got anywhert , pc inspector cannot get the data.

and how do i boot off 8 gig when it was used for data not operating system?

I suggest you not to try booting from that disk! It could ruin your data permanently!

Does the harddisk still show up in the bios?

yes the bios i do not understand but yes it does. There is master and slave definitions and some other i forget.  But i saw that it did cause i checked this first.   PCINSPECTOR and WinXP see the drive as 8 gig but with 0 free  and 0 used ???  oh pcinspector did say bad boot sector 0=0  whatever that is. I guess I could gointo bios and formatt it from there ?  I am nearly ready to try that just to see if it will?  But while there is a chance to get data back i will wait.

Lot of those websites seem to be about getting back files.... more than the case of a whole disk going awol  ....but i guess its all similar.types probs and fixes.

If there is anything i can get you information wise ,please let me know i will try and follow through !

Linux uses a Windows incompatable file system, if you have Partition Magic you can try and convert it but that's risky. Your best bet would be to rewrite your boot manager, log into linux, copy whatever data you need onto one of the fat drives and then format. Windows sees linux partitions as bad, and so it won't recognise the fact that there is an additional 4GB on that drive.

I had the same exact problem when i moved to XP.

I'll go here  http://www.runtime.org/    tomorra.. gota go sleep :-)

Hey RobbieCrash !  I dont expect it to recognise the linux file sys...  but it did always recognise the fat32 that it WAS using for win games and saveds files.  Half that drive is linux 4gig.... the other half is fat32......that was going alright untill one day in the middle of the night....it didnt :-)

Hi again, I went to runtime .org  and downloaded their program.  So now the problem has changed a tiny bit. I can now use drive D:  yippee!  it now comes up as 4 gig free 24kb used. It seems to be operating normally. Though  I think i may reformatt just for the heck of it .. feel better. This is freakty drives going bad like that!  I can see all the data i had on it before the flippin thing went and freaked out/died.  But only when using the program i downloaded, and it will only allow me to save one file at a time........ I dont think i have that sort of patience.  At least it is there..and the drive is back. in working order... not sure how this was restored. Seems the newly downloaded program fixed it by just looking to restore files but as i said windows only sees a blank formatted disk on its own, .....I need to use the new program to see the files.

You might find it worth to buy the program so you can recover your data a lot faster, just save it on another drive untill you format the drive again.

Thanks for your help.