well i have an acer travelmate, i had formatted the partition drive (D) as Ntfs but my C drive was still fat32, until recent while downloading a file from the net the notebook just rebooted and the windows does not boot now, i booted from the cdrom and found that the d drive does not exist any more, i tried running scandisk but it shows errors in a lot of system files, and then goes out of memory, i tried fdisk but that too wont work. the problem is that i have some important files on the c drive which i can see but i dont know how to retreave them from dos and where do i copy them is there a way i can teporarly run windows and burn the data on a disk and then format the system. please help
thanx

Probably the reason you can't "see" the NTFS partition when booted from the CD is that it is a DOS based CD.

If the machine has a floppy, or if you can burn a bootable CD with the old laplink (ll3.exe) or xtlink (xtlink.com) you could transfer the files over a "laplink, pcanywhere, null modem, or direct connection" cable, different names for about the same cable--although there were minor differences over the years.

Also, if you are "handy" you could buy a hd cable adaptor that will let you hook up the laptop harddrive as a slave drive into your desktop machine. These are not much money, but you may have to remove the laptop hd from some sort of caddy to use it (I'm not familiar with the drive caddy on your laptop)

i finally retreaved the data and got the laptop running, i used the hdd converter, and now i am good to go.
thanx