Hi all, me again... I installed NT onto a FAT partition and have an extended NTFS partition for my files. I also have a 17Gb hardrive that is FAT32 and it contains all my previous files that I cannot lose! Well as you know NT doesn't recognise FAT32 so I downloaded the utility from winternals. After installing, NT blue screens on boot when reading the drive. So I bought a copy of partition magic so I could convert the drive to FAT or NTFS and when I run it, it tells me the partition on the disk is bad and I should not run any utility from the program until backup the data, repartition and the copy the data back on the drive. I have approx 2 GB of files that I can't lose. I just bought a burner to back everyhtng up before this happened. What a nightmare. HELP!!!

I tend to favour sysinternals products.. I don't know if they're the same, but they do seem to get more recommendations... In the meantime - an idea that may work... Is '98 installed on the 17Gig FAT32 HD? If so, can you get access via that '98 installation on that drive to the data files...? If so have you a second PC into which you can put this HD? If so you could network the two PC's using NetBeui as the protocol (easiest to set up, fewest problems, simplest to use; ideal for a simple LAN...) and transfer the data files to the other (NT) system? Need info on networking, quickest way is to go through it with Helmig at: http://www.wown.com He does it well, and it's all there... This presumes that somehow you get back into NT successfully - see comments below... It might not 'hurt' to check the info at http://www.sysinternals.com re 'their' version of FAT32 for NT... There is some useful input there. If you were able to uninstall the winternals version, install the sysinternals version of FAT32 for NT you might succeed that way? If you cannot get back into NT, then I guess you are into a re-install (choose the Upgrade option - for the current NT installation - during the set-up/install sequence); also apply any Service Pack, and MAKE the ERD for the NT installation... Then either try Networking as suggested above, or see if the sysinternals version works better for you? If you can still access data on the 17Gig from within '98 (it being installed there already?) then all is not lost... It's just a matter of finding some way to get the data across, and networking may be the viable answer...

The networking is a good idea. If the partition table is corrupt, which I think it is, will 98 still be able to see the data on the drive, or am I looking at a data recovery operation. I was thinking of taking my drive an installing it on a Novel network system running Win98...if I can't see the drive's data I am going to clone the drive and try PowerQuest's Lost and Found on it and see if I can move the data to another location on the network. Any other suggestions?