OT - Win98 HDD can't be read by XP, now won't boot

[Ed Kolis]

Long story: Well, about 4 years ago my family replaced their computer because it wouldn't boot anymore - then it started working again, so we gave it to our grandparents because we'd already bought a newer, faster one. They never used it though, so yesterday I went and got it back from them for use as a web server. I was planning to ghost the hard drive drive over the network for safekeeping before wiping it and installing Linux, but Ghost didn't have a driver information file or something for my wireless NIC and it looked too complicated to set one up. So I took the hard drive out and put it in my WinXP PC as a second drive to ghost it from there, but my computer couldn't read it! I put it back in its original computer, and lo and behold, it froze at the boot screen just like it did 4 years ago! So, anyone know what I can do before I just give up and wipe the drive, seeing as there was little if anything of value actually on it (I just wanted to ghost it Just In Case (tm) )

Short(er? ) story: Anyone know what could cause a Win98 partition to be unreadable? The MBR seems to be fine because Win98 can boot to it, but neither Win98 or WinXP can actually read anything off of the drive - when booting it standalone in 98, it hangs after "booting to IDE-0: OK", and reading it in an XP machine as a second HDD says "drive E: cannot be read, format it?" I'm probably just going to format it with Damn Small Linux when I get home, because there's little if any data on there that I actually need to recover, but if anyone has any suggestions I'd appreciate them (I tried SeaTools from seagate.com and it said it couldn't recognize the filesystem on the drive, but the drive physically checked ok... )

[Fyron]

The master file table in the file system could be corrupted. There are various file recovery tools you could try to get the data off the drive, but you probably needn't bother if you don't care much about it.

[Suicide Junkie]

Boot from a floppy and try a scandisk to see if you can't fix it?

[Thermodyne]

Off hand, did you set the jumper correctly for the position in the new system? If it’s the only drive on the cable, master or cs is fine. If it’s a second drive on the cable then you need to see how the first drive is set. You can use cs +cs or Master + Slave but not Single drive + anything else.

The blue screen on reinstalling it indicates a problem with the drive, assuming that you made no changes to it. And if it was in fact not used much, it is probably the same problem as before just an hour or less of use later.

It almost sounds like the drive is about to go bad. Can you hear it spin up when the PC powers on? If not, give it a good whack with a small screwdriver handle and see if it spins up then. If that fixes it, get your data off ASAP then toss it.

With ghost, you can add more or less any network driver you want to. Just start to build the boot disk and when you get to the Network card window, hit the add button. Then map to the driver install disk and then to the driver. Add it, name it, then build the bootdisk with it.

[Ed Kolis]

I forgot to switch the jumper when I moved the HDD; neglecting that wouldn't actually ruin the data or the drive, would it? Perhaps I just messed up the jumper on the return trip... I didn't mess with it but it might have been loose and fallen off...

[Fyron]

Wrong jumper settings won't damage the drive or the file system. BIOS just won't read one or the other of the drives (or possibly neither).