One day my (single), healthy, FAT-32 formatted hard disk stopped working. By that I mean it would no longer boot Windows 98 from IDE-0. I ran a boot disk and tried accessing the C:\ but it said it was inaccessible. I then run FDisk and it said the single logical partition was FAT 16 - weird!! To try and make life simpler I unplugged the faulty drive and installed a new hard disk, formatted it to NTFS and installed XP. I then plugged-in the faulty one, set it as a slave and am now trying desperately to access it. Windows recognised it as a FUJITSU MPE3273AT and installed it as E:\. When you try and access it directly it says the drive is not formatted, would you like to format it? I answer no. When I run the Computer Management tool and select disk management it appeared as a healthy active parition but there was no info about the file system. When I run chkdsk E:\ /f it complains that the filesystem is RAW and it wont work. When I try running scan disk it simply wont run. I then installed two tools that were recommended in this forum for such instances: Disk Investigator v1.31 (available www.theabsolute.net/sware) but this didnt recognise the drive. PC Inspector File Recovery (www.convar.de) When this loads it complains of a bad parameter in boot sector: [ bytes per sector (47968) > 32768! ] and it says bad parameter in boot sector: [ root directory cluster (1000008382) > count of clusters ] So in summary it seems that: (1) the disk is working and hasnt crashed physically (2) the MBR is corrupt in some way I really dont want to have to format the disk and start again because I have lots of important documents on it. Does anyone know what to do in this situation. I am aware that there are tools around that claim to be able to repair/recover the MBR but is this the only solution? If it is, can anyone recommend a tool which has worked in the past for them? I am also aware of tools that claim to be able to recover files even from RAW format drives- is it worth pursuing that avenue? Thanks for your help!!

Put this problem drive back as master alone on a ide channel. Use the 2nd ide channel. Boot up on a 98 boot disk [download from bootdisk.com if need be]. Start by doing a fdisk /mbr. Set your bios to boot the 2nd ide channel and see if you can boot the disk. If not come back up on the floppy and sys c: [actual command]. This will refresh the 98 boot files. You may need to copy fdisk and sys to the floppy. By slaving the drive you muddied the waters due to the other drive controlling the problem drives parameters. This is why I am making the recommendation you put the drive back to being alone. To go beyond this point would require a hex disk editor [Norton's Diskedit for example]. You would then have to figure out how to edit the partiton information describing the file system. Web search may provide this information to you. Good luck!

quote from the web: As they say, 'a little knowledge can be dangerous' in this field as in many others. For example, too many people often think that the command "FDISK /MBR" is the 'cure all' for most of their disk drive troubles. The truth is that this will ONLY work if the "code" in the MBR has been corrupted, or was replaced by some code for a different OS (such as the Linux Loader; LILO); it does nothing for your Partition Table data; and in some cases can actually make matters worse! Try here for some possible tools.

if you know someone with windows 2k loaded on their box, try putting your drive in to their machine. my windows 2k machine appears to read files on disks formatted with the RAW format without noticing a problem. this should allow you to recover your files. i have a slightly different way of handling these problems....due to some peculiarities of the way dos and windows writes to disk and maintains its file system, i have noticed situations where simply deleting, repartitioning and reinstalling files doenst work well. after recovering your files, id repartition, and use a disk utility to write zeroes to the drive. if you dont have one, then simply repartition, format, and fill the drive with files such as large .mov or mp3 files. once it is full, delete everything, copy all your saved files from the orriginal raw disk back on to it, and then use the sys command to put the operating system back on to the drive. writing zeroes to the drive may be useless but ive had several mysterious problems dissapear after doing this. if you have a lot of time and doubt that this could matter, i suggest the following exercise: on a machine with say, windows 98, make a directory C:\ibelieve. then make a text file with some sort of info in it and place it in the folder C:\ibelieve, so now you have C:\ibelieve\readme.txt. ok now, format the drive and reinstall windows 98 nice clean install, huh? guesse again. now create the directory c:\ibelieve again. holy shmoly! lookie here, the text file C:\ibelieve\readme.txt is BACK!!! where the hell did that come from? ill tell you...it appeared because windows and dos in general suxxors and it was recreated out of the empty space on the drive that wasnt wiped. now imagine this.....one of your ini files got corrupted and caused the initial problem. you delete everything and reload your system but the corrupt ini file reappears in a similar way thus boning you and your system one more time. aye carrumba. have fun :) have fun :)