Ok, we submitted then withdrew and now we are resubmitting this question again! [We thought we figured it out]. I’ve never come across this situation before.
Scenario: Workstation used to dual-boot W95-B (OSR-2) and NT4. Used FAT32NT driver inNT and set up a data (NTFS) partition for NT and a FAT32 data partition for W95. Stupidly updated the FAT32NT driver(s) (don’t update or upgrade when things work). Everything APPEARED to be fine and life was good…until the next day when we booted the system we got CHKFAT32 dialogue stating the drive was being checked. Then we saw the drive light (LED) stay on for a long time. The partition being worked on was the FAT32 partition which is around 18 Gigs w/ about 10 Gigs of data.
We thought it was doing a surface test. However, upon rebooting, we see that the drive (partition) LABEL is missing, and we are unable to access the drive/partition. We were afraid that our data was toast because we rebooted to the Win95 side and the partition was not accessible there either. Then we tried Partition Magic which also stated that the drive was “unformatted”. Surprisingly, when we booted into DOS 7 “Safe Mode Command Prompt Only”, BINGO, the data was there!!!!???? Now the questions are how do we recover the data without losing the long file names?! Why can we access the data in DOS 7 but not in either W95 or NT and …if PQMagic reports the drive as “unformatted” why are we able to access it in DOS?! We do have a SCSI DDS3 tapedrive and CDRW to use to backup but I cannot think how in DOS to do that. Rather could we use
the “XCOPY32” command but I seem to recall that only works in a DOS BOX. Does anyone know of what we could do? We thought of using “Lost & Found” which allows you to restore the LFNs but have had mixed results using that utility.
Any help would be a cherished blessing! Thank you!
