Hello. my problem is with a couple Hard drives, #1 Quantum FB EL 650 (junk)
and #2 WD Caviar wd400 enh/ide 40gig (prim).. on a 566 Pentium with 512mb ram, tyan motherboard, award bios.. (and for gen ref. powergraph 4d/10 Video, cmi 8738 Audio, and the oldest MotorolaSurfr56k Ive Ever Seen) now your prob saying yeah that junk sys is the prob,, lol. but hey i believe if it powers up it can work.. and my main sys burned, nice deal on ebay though... buyer beware. ok... here is the foreground.
I had been running the 40gig WD as i do audio recording in my home studio. (im a wire guy not a circuit guy.) running win98se as i still prefer it for my recording software. but i couldnt get the old modem configed or perfaps my network assigned, so i plugged in the ole 5 gig Fireball from an old gateway i use as a lampstand, it was running 98 not se so i could deal with it, the 650 had been compressed to 5 gig, 2gig c, with win on it, 2 gig d storeage, 800mb e waste of space and 200mb f ramdrive to compensate the old gateway limits,. blah.. the quantum win98 drive loaded the modem, the isp software and got me online,, so for a month i was constantly swithing drives recklessly, no problem.. at all.. surprizingly, sometimes even slaving one to quickly move data.. no prob..
till one day,., my girl says hey how about some worthless Sims Game Crack, since you download stuff all the time.. i knew better i did, had even just been downloading small ebook files and waiting to scan em before opening... blah... get the crack open it.. reboot sometime later maybe next day.... with same drive and it hangs on DMI before windows loads.... now i hadnt noticed that time on cmos/bios info screen , but the next time i tried i caught it said the drive name all crazy with exclamation marks like some foreign language. so i say blah,, must have deleted a system file, cause im good at that.. so i master the WD (prim) and Slave the Problem drive... ok... i can see all the drives on both Disks.. only thing i notice is that all the system files on the main drive of the slave are renamed crazy things like the volume label was.... like the windows folder is now "Wineows!" i think.. hmm i musta screwed up my system with some language thing, as i had been playing with spybot and i am pretty fanatic about controlling my system registry manually... so i run Scan disk thinking maybe it will actually fix something as i had always seen the "changed file names" opt in settings.. nothing.. big surprise.. i then run SFC and replace all my corrupt files from backup... BTW im Neurotic and Compulsive and therefore purposely leave myself backups and such for problems i create, shame same effort couldnt back up data.. blah... SFC didnt work either, looked like it was gonna, didnt, so i then manually re SYS'ed and it loaded in safe mode a few times with out the Primary Drive,, I Use a USB CDR as my CDROM so in safe mode im just stuck unless the info is on there.. hadnt updated PCCILLAN and couldnt get online.. Well... i left it and made plans to get a regular ide cdrom from a system i lent i friend. turn to the Primary drive to try to get it online Which i had been trying for a month to no avail.. and There it is Now Happening to my Primary... Man ,, Bad News For Me. i really Cant lose that data.. so i put it up and experiment on the Quantum FB for a quick fix, when i should have waited.... i try it all even pulling out the old floppy drives i never use and trying backup disks for 98, 98se... try formatting , fdisk,, nothing,, as it isnt picking up that drive and the c: im looking at is the bogus one the startup disk creates, i cant do anything.. cant even format,, i never dreamt... when i run bios it is there physically.. i can select it, doesnt help, leave it on auto, sometimes i get a message while the backup disk loads saying it doesnt detect any fat drives and it could be from antivirus software, a virus, or the drive could need partitioned if its new.... sometimes as well i get the blue screen of death saying im halted it it missing a fat or fat32 file necessary... now if i try to boot with out disk... it looks ok but freezes reading dmi.. i was able last night when i finally got the regular CDROM to get an even older quantum FB 650 i pulled from a stack of win95 workstations to upgrade to win98, load my modem and get online to be here.. but i need some advise.. sorry for the novel.. im sure i still left out the info you need to help me.. but ill be sitting here probably anyway.. .these are all my points,,, sorry i dont have more.
I doubt this is a boot sector virus - they're not too common anymore it seems.
I'd suggest going about this very slowly.
Get a machine that hasn't got an O/S, not even a hard drive.
Hook up ONLY this HD to the primary IDE channel, jumpered for master/single (watch out for some WD drives!). Power up and watch the BIOS detect the HD. If it seems OK, but no boot, use a win9X boot floppy to boot this machine.
Run fdisk, option #4 (show partition info). What does it say?
The best option is to use the machine in which this drive was last known to work; at least the BIOS will detect it in the same way as it was detected when it was working.
If no go at all, you may have to consider a data recovery service.
One other option is to hook the drive up as a slave in a working machine that can understand FAT 32. If you're lucky, the drive is properly recognized and you can sipho off the data you need..
/RID