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Converting a damaged NT server c:\ drive

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8 replies

by assamite

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Situation: I have an NT 4 SP6a server running SQL and Exchange 5.5 that until now has ran fine, due to a long out of hours power failure the UPS discharged and the server shut down. There are no errors reported in the event log and no data has been lost, however drive c:\ now reports itself as a FAT16 format. The NT Convert command will not read the drive as FAT16 and prompts to format the disk instead, the server works fine however for security reason the drive needs to be converted back toNTFS. Any Ideas anyone?

8 replies

by rkelly

The disk must still be ntfs, even if it is reporting itself incorrectly.

I'd be tempted to try an emergency repair on the NT Installation - just do it to repair the disks, don't update any files.

Obviously you'll only be able to do this if youhave recent update information that was created BEFORE the crash.

by assamite

Have tried this but it is still reporting as a FAT16 drive, you can boot with a fat16 boot disk created in win95 or Dos 6.22 and you have access to the drive.

by rkelly

Have you tried running the convert in verbose mode to see if it gives you any extra information?

convert c: /fs:ntfs /v

This should give you an idea as to what is going on.

by rkelly

Have you also tried a CHKDSK c: /F /R to try and fix any errors using chkdsk.

This will need a reboot and will probably take 15/30 minutes to run.

by assamite

Convert will only attempt to format the drive with verbose mode on or off, chkdsk will not reconise the drive from within NT, however if you reboot and load into dos it will scan the drive and all is well. The problem seems to be NT utilities beingable to reconise the file system as nothing else seems to be effected.

by bjwyatt_1999

Does chkdsk run fine? Does it also report NTFS or FAT16? The power failure couldn't have converted the system back to FAT16, do permisions still seem enabled?

by assamite

The c:\ drive is now not accessable from the NT enviroment, however the boot.ini etc is all located on this drive so I must assume it is a problem with NT reading the FAT tables or disk is on the way out.. Scandisk offers no insight and no errors are reported, I have used Powerquests partition magic to gain some insight however this reports the c:\ drive as FAT16.

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