Retrieving data from an unbootable drive.

[LeftCoast]

Hi all,

Yeah, I could probably get it to boot if I spent many, many more man-hours than the data is actually worth to me, but that's another thread.

I'd like to just cut my losses, and slave the unbootable drive to my other former back-up drive, save the files I want, put the drive into another box and format that little sob (and it's Highmem prob) into oblivion. The question: is there a way to do this without messing up all the drive letter pathways on installed hardware/software in the good drive? I seem to remember doing this and it being a total clusterf@%$ after I removed the second HDD, and had to start fresh on that drive shortly thereafter.

Is there another solution I'm totally overlooking, like a utility that will get me booted on the bad HDD, independent of slaving it to a working bootable drive?

As always, thanks in advance for all the responses, and hopefully sometime in the not-too-distant future I'll be answering more questions in these forums than I ask!

-LC

[TOAD6147]

Why do you say it's unbootable? What kind of error do you get? Can you see the partitions in fdisk and if you boot with a bootdisk can you see the files? Need to be a bit more informative and specific. At a DOS prompt try 'fdisk /mbr'.

[Richard Cranium]

What o/s ?

For 98 try scanreg /restore

On moving data, I make a new folder in the C: drive and just pull the CD cable and put the HD on as master, prolly a bit faster than making it the slave.

[LeftCoast]

Hi Toad!

Now you know the reason you've posted 2454 (a heroic number, I might add) times and I have just 74.

It's been a long time since I've looked at the bad drive, but see this link for description of problem:

http://www.techimo.com/forum/showthr...threadid=34156

The main method of backing-up data for me is saving files to a cd-rw/cd-r; I don't have any critical programs I can't reinstall.

-LC

[LeftCoast]

Yo RC,

Could you be more specific, on the data transfer part? Pull the cable, etc?

[NeoStarO1]

What he means is to just take the cable that is connected to your CD Rom and connected to your other hard drive as master and take the slave off after you have created a new folder in C:

meaning:
1. Create folder in C for all your backed up data.
2. Disconnect the cd rom and connect your hard drive as master
3. back up your data to the newely crreated folder in step 1
4. Once your data is saved then you can format your primary drive or whatever .

That help?

3. connect using the cable from your CD Rom to the second hard drive as master.

[Ruler2112]

Your mention of the drives 'himem prob' make me think it's a problem with your boot configuration and not a problem with the drive itself. Try booting up into DOS and looking at the drive. If you can see it, try renaming config.sys and autoexec.bat to config.xxx and autoexec.xxx and restart. Win9x *usually* doesn't need these, but there are times that drivers loaded in these files are needed. If you can load windoze though, you know it's just a matter of tracking down what's causing your problem in those two files.

[Richard Cranium]

LC, 1st thing is to boot to DOS and for W98/ME type in
scanreg /restore
choose a date before the problems started.

Could you be more specific, on the data transfer part? Pull the cable, etc

Just pull the cable outta the CD-ROM, stick it into the HD.

Fire it up, go to BIOS and auto-detect the HD's if you have this option, if not just let it try to find em in POST.

Then open my computer and drag what you want to the new HD.
You may have to "cut & paste" to get a full transfer, some of my drag & drops failed..

[screen]

Windows may not allow copying of the system files.

You can follow DOC's (Richard Cranium) suggestion to connect the problematic drive as a slave drive. Boot into DOS mode, use

md c:\olddata
c:\windows\command\xcopy32 d:\. c:\olddata\. /s/v

In the above commands, I assume that
- your backup drive is bootable and you can boot to DOS mode.
- your backup drive is the master drive (C
- the old and problematic drive is the slave drive (D.
This should copy all the files (including system files) from your old drive to the backup drive.

-Screen