I am using a Packard Bell Legend 486DX -33MHZ box with 36 MB RAM. I installed a second hard drive several months back and it has been running great. I have my basic Win 3.1 and Dos directories on the original C: drive and most of my data and swap file on the new D: drive. A couple of days ago, I noticed when shutting down the computer and attempting to run 'undelete /purge' from the dos prompt I got a "read fault" error message while trying to access the Delete Sentry file on D: drive. I didn't think much of it since I was powering down, but the next time I booted, I got the "Corrupt Swap File" message (permanent swap file being on D: drive) and then a SYSTEM ERROR box stating UNABLE TO READ FROM DRIVE D. Then when File Manager came on, it didn't recognize my new D: drive, and assigned 'D' to my Cd-Rom drive, which had been 'E'. My CMOS Bios still detects both drives! I also used the EZDIAG utility from Western Digital (my second D: drive being a Western Digital Caviar 2540 540 MB "legacy" drive) and it tested out perfectly on all tests! Yet, Windows (and Dos) don't recognize the second drive. I can't use Scandisk from a dos prompt, because Dos says it's a NETWORK drive, ie, a CD Rom drive. the command FDISK / STATUS appears to detect the second drive, but only assigns 11 MB to it's total. I tried using DISKSCAN.exe as an alternative to SCANDISK and it came back saying that something in the Root directory partition was not good. But then, I heard that some copies of DISKSCAN.exe have been tampered with (hacked) and that they actually WRITE BAD SECTORS rather than fixing them, so I decided not to use that particular utility, out of caution. Question is: how can the BIOS detect both drives, yet Windows and Dos not be able to do so? Soon to be at the end of a short rope, TIA for any ideas --- Bruce

Just a guess, but it sounds like either the partition table has become corrupted, or the disk has sustained some serious mechanical damage. You might try one of the classic disk tools - Norton or PC Tools - I still use them on my older disks. Try here at Wayne's site. Might not be much you can do though, still, nothing to lose by trying.

Hi, Each time I have encountered your problem only way out was to Fdisk, remove all partitions, reboot, Fdisk repartition, and format the drive. Even this has failed on some of the old drives and they became paperweights. Good Luck james

Thanks for your input. You pretty much confirmed my worst fears. The good news is that I backed up the most important data I had, except for some enhancements I had installed, plus my web browsers, which can be re-downloaded. I used a utility I found on http://www.uneraser.com, a demo version of their product, and it reported that I had a corrupt MBR or a bad sector #0. Since I had failed to make a backup of the MBR when I formatted and partitioned the drive, I guess I'll chalk that one up to trial and error, heavy emphasis on the ERROR part . Hah! LOL to keep from CIMB (crying in my beer!)-

BTW Jboy -- which tools specifically on "Wayne's" web site did you think I could use for my particular problem? I extracted WinDisk Fix from the PC Tools 2.0 archive, but when I tried to run it, I got the error message "insufficient memory to run application" My problem is that my C: drive is nearly full with "essentials" I don't want to lose, so my temp swap file is pretty small for virtual memory usage at the moment -- TIA, Bruce

Well, I was mainly referring to the DOS utilities, Norton 7 or so and PC Tools 9. Although there are disk utilities that can work under Win31, to my mind it's always better to do disk repair in pure DOS. I did d/l the PC Tools Windows Desktop from Wayne's site, and it does come with a package of (more or less PCT 9) basic DOS tools to go with it - pretty much need to do a complete install, or else know just what to set up if you wish to do it manually. The DOS versions have minimal memory requirements - will run with little or no extended mem. PC Tools & Norton for DOS were the best DOS utilities around (imho) - don't work so well on modern machines, but I still use them on my 'legacy' boxes. For disk repair, PC Tools Diskfix is good, but Norton Disk Doctor and some other Norton stuff (Calibrate?) is better. Scandisk 'gives up' too easily on some drive problems. Yeah, track 0 bad errors are pretty much unrecoverable - although you *might* be able to partition the disk down - occasionally that works. It's good that you made backups - even with web access, there's always stuff that's hard to replace (or at least it's time consuming). LOL - my C: drive has the same problem yours does - too many "essentials".

thanks again for the info. Yeah, my C:\ drive is definitely "legacy" -- Seagate 233MB formatted. Not a lot of room . . . It used to be Doublespaced and I got the second drive so I could eliminate disk compression. The second drive is a 540 MB (512 formatted) and so I was really stretching out in that one. the problem actually surfaced after I deleted many MB's of data and programs I decided I needed to clean out -- trying to "purge" the UNDELETE utility from the dos prompt prior to shutdown is when I got the first READ FAULT error message. Since this is all a learning experience, I'm gonna play around with some of the utilities and see what I can learn from it and then I'll delete the partition, re-partition and then re-format and get on with it. thanks again - Bruce