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Hard Drive Problem

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by digital_dna

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Question; Customer wants new hard drive and would like to keep some of the files on old hard drive. My initial thought was "No Problem, I'll just pop out the old drive, put in the new drive, format it, install the OS and then set the old drive to "Slave", through it back in the system and copy the file's off. In a perfect world it probably would have worked.

Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world, it didn't! The "Slave" drive was detected in the BIOS but I couldn't see it from the Windows 98 FAT 32 partition when the system booted. If you can't see the drive you can't copy file's.

So, figuring it may be a file system problem (FAT32 Can't see a NTFS Partition) I set the drive back to Master, removed the new drive, threw the old one back in, rebooted, entered the BIOS to make sure the drive was detected (it was). Immediately after POST I get the "Error, NTLDR is missing" message. Hmmm! well let me boot from the Windows 2000 cd and repair the OS. Nope! No OS detected to repair. NOT GOOD!

Now I'm stuck, I'm thinking that the partition is corrupt, I need to know how I can check the drive to make sure the partition is set "Active" and possibly repair the MBR.

In the past I would just use the FDISK /MBR command to recreate the MBR, use SYS C: to copy the system file's from the boot disk to the boot partition and be done with it. Windows 2000 doesn't use the same system files so ?SYS C:? is basically useless. FDISK is useless because it?s a NTFS Partition and FDISK won?t recognize it (Right?).

What program can I use to check the drive Partition to make sure its active and repair the partition MBR if need be? Can I still use FDISK even though it?s a Windows 2000 NTFS Partition? Is there aWin 2000 tool that will give me the power I need? If so, what is it and where can I get it?

Thanks
ebcdic

8 replies

by jim babay

To directly answer your question as to repairing the w2k ntfs5 mbr there are specific command line utilies available that may help you. You will need to run either the cd or the 4 diskettes to access the Recovery Console.
1) Fixboot - Fixes Boot sector problems. Form = Fixboot C:
2) Fixmbr - Fixes (installs) the boot record. For more info use : Help Fixboot
Since everything should "clean" (no programs yet installed) if the above utilities don't help, I'd just start over from scratch &reinstall w2k.

by thechas

There are 2 utilities that might help you copy the files if the file table is not in too bad a shape.

System Internals www.systeminternals.com has NTSF reader utilities that work from DOS or W98.

That way, you could copy the needed files, and not have to worry about recovering the W2K installation.

Chas

by digital_dna

The drive in question has two partitions. I'm thinking that possibly the wrong partition is set to Active. How can I determine this and change the proper partition back to active? Can I use FDISK to do this even though both partitions are NTFS?

by seanmcpherson

You are making this too complicated. You don't need it to boot to get files. If the machine has two IDE chains, take off the cd rom, put the hard drive on it. Make sure the setting in the BIOS is "AUTO" and let her rip. I did this to a hard drive that died. It wouldn't boot, but I was able to save the documents and email profile. I hope I haven't misunderstood your question and good luck!

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