(o_0).o0( wha? ) ================= a strange thing occurred. allow me to state the problem, my system, and my subsequent actions. This is going to be a rather long explanation, so please bear with me. problem: logical drive (E:) in ext dos partition disappeared after a reboot. system: windows 98, 40gb quantum fireball AS; hd paritioned into 2 sectors, 1 primary dos (fat32) partition, 1 extended dos (fat32), 1 logical drive (fat32). actions: before i had the previous hd setup, my hd had been partition into 3 sections; that 1 logical drive was 2 logical drives. respectively named E:, F: now, this F: drive would mirror everything on the E: drive. so, i decided to combine the two paritions with linux cfdisk. reformatted with dos format after that. the logical drive (E:) reads 18gb (approx), but windows reports 9.4gb. not knowing what to do, i kept the partition table the way it was. a month and a half to two months later, i reboot only to find out that my E: drive is missing. one of my friends told me to reinstall my mbr with aefdisk. did that. problem not solved. then, my floppy drive was acting funny and wouldn't boot floppies. it's fine now for some reason. the same friend told me that it sounded like my controller card was bad, which would corrupt my mbr, thus my problem. i put my hard drive on my roommate's pc to troubleshoot that, same problem. also, i looked at the parition information in dos fdisk, which reports no drive letter or volume label (which it had before) for the ext dos partition which disappeared. so, the problem HAS to be with the disk. is it a hardware, software, partitioning problem? what can i try to troubleshoot this? can my data be saved? are paritions overlapping? how can i avoid this problem in the future when partitioning, if that is the case? any help would be appreciated! rew e | w_|

i think you stuffed up the original partitioning and then stuffed it up even more using the linux fdisk. get partition magic and it will show you where you went wrong (hopefully) then you can use it to fix the problem.

since you used linux partitioning tools, it's hard for me to say but a linux guru might know... I would say that your data is defineately still there and intact unless you resized the primary partition. it might be a possibility that the partition got changed to a second primary partition and consequentialy hidden since it is also a fat32 file system... it sounds like a far shot but you never know. some different software might reveal more. Some things I like to use are: Partition Magic for DOS you get the dos version by installing the windows version and finding the dos files in the program folder. Norton Disk Doctor for DOS like above, you find NDD.exe for dos which supports large drives in the program folder of a newer windows version installation.