Help! Boot drive has disappeared!

[Jonty]

The weekend was going so well too...

Specs - PII 400, 512MB, ATI All in wonder graphics, Bigfoot 12gb C drive and Zip on primary, DVD and CDRW on secondary, Promise controller card with Quantum Fireball 26gb and Maxtor DiamondMax 80gb. Windows 98 first edition.

OK, as I had just installed the Maxtor yesterday with no problems, I needed to change the CDROM drive letters in applications. I did this today using an old Quantum utility called Diskmanger2000, I've used it before, and although a bit flaky did the job. This utility can also partition drives etc.

Ran the utility just now to update the CDROM drive letters, it crashed at the start but Norton Crashguard recovered it and it continued to the end. I needed to restart anyway so did so, got back to the desktop and then the Quantum banner came up and promptly froze the screen (as far as I know the Quantum program had finished before I restarted). Couldn't do a ctrl-alt-del so pressed reset.

The computer restarted but did not find the Bigfoot C drive or the Zip on the primary! All the other drives were found. It got to the Verifying DMI Pool Data and said 'Not found any [active partition] in HDD' 'Disk boot failure, insert system disk and press enter'

I put my Windows boot disk in and got to the A prompt. Went into Fdisk and no sign of my Bigfoot C drive. In fact the two drives on the controller card were there as C & D.

Came out of this and checked the motherboard bios, nothing had changed, hard drive set to auto etc.

At this point I shut the machine down and checked the connections seeing that I have just installed the Maxtor. Everything was solid and OK. Switched on again, and this time Bigfoot and the Zip were found on the primary along with all the other drives. However still the same message came up at the Verifying DMI part. Started with the Windows floppy, went into Fdisk and this time Bigfoot was there but with no drive letter, just as though it was a new drive. The other two drives were C & D again.

Fdisk is saying that Bigfoot has no partitions, I did try and set that drive as active but it said there were no partitions to set active.

Something must have screwed up with that old Quantum utility, but I didn't touch anything to do with partitioning, just the CDROM part.

Any help much appreciated, I did plan to make the Maxtor the boot disc but not until later, I want to get to my stuff on the Bigfoot drive before I do that!

I'm using my backup machine to write this - thank goodness for that.

[excuzzzeme]

has the drive been formatted? If it was, suspect the boot part got wiped
Do you have a 98 emer disk with fdisk/format on it? You can fdisk/format and then copy boot files to drive.

[Jonty]

The Bigfoot drive is the original boot drive that came with the computer. It was working fine until a couple hours ago!

I don't want to do anything distructive to the drive until I can get my data off of it.

I've been doing a bit of searching - what does Fdisk /mbr do? Does that repair the master boot record? If it does will my stuff still be on the drive?

BTW - the drive was set up with just the one partition.

[excuzzzeme]

yes it is SUPPOSED to correct MBR and MOST of the time it does. You may also want to try

Insert floppy
A: \ sys C:
will copy boot record to C:

[Jonty]

OK, say I do the floppy thing with /sys C:, would that make the drive bootable, seeing that fdisk has just said there are no partitions on it?

[excuzzzeme]

I would try that just to see if maybe it is being reported wrong. If not then your only choice is to FDISK and reformat

[Jonty]

I will try that but I'll wait on a little until I do. I just don't want to lose that data.

[excuzzzeme]

any chance you can plug drive into running machine. boot into safe mode and back-up files?

[excuzzzeme]

that's assuming it's still alive

[Jonty]

But fdisk says there are no partitions on it so even if I put it into another machine how could it be read?