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fix fat 32 changed to non dos partition

By anderson ·
lead in, I have the following problem, My computer locked up an I had to reboot it. When I tried to reboot it would not boot up
normall or in windows safe mode just said operating system missing. So I booted it up with a windows se boot disk,
and tried to access the hard drive and got invalid command. Next step was to check it with fdisk after I found out the
Bios read the disk but didn't show it on bios main screen.
At this point I new I had trouble with the hard disk, so ran fdisk to see what problem was, To my dismay I find that
the partition has been change from a fat 32 to a non dos partition. I can access the disk with Paragon Partition Manager
version 7 and view the disk in absolute sector mode. Only I find no way to correct sectors that sets it to a fat 32 partition
again, as most of the information is in hex which I don't know and some is readable. From what I read in the Partition
Manager help I can copy and edit sectors an so forth.
Question: My question is can the hard drive partition be restored to the fat 32 it was from the non dos it shows now, with out loosing
any thing on the hard drive.

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by idowindows In reply to fix fat 32 changed to non ...

I can assure you almost 100% that you will lose data if you change your drive's table. Once you decide to change it to FAT32, you will have no option other than ..... (gulp!) format.

Keep us posted.

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by anderson In reply to

Poster rated this answer.

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by pierrejamme In reply to fix fat 32 changed to non ...

You didn't mention OS, but you might try:
fix /mbr from the boot disk. See:
http://www.sysint.no/Nedlasting/MbrFix.htm
for mor info or google on fix /mbr

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by anderson In reply to

web site didn't help solve problem an didn't give the information I needed to restore disk back to a fat 32 and not loose and data on hard drive. but thank for the help.

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by Dumphrey In reply to fix fat 32 changed to non ...

You can also try testdisk for dos, on a 98 boot disk to see if it recognizes the old fat32 partition and can restore the MFT. but I would image the disk to be safe and not loose any data (well, more then you have already =\)

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