Bad Partition Table

[CdnMade]

ok i have a huge problem that i need fixed for a friend

What happened was he was trying to install windows me on top on 95. and did a bunch of crap. He is not even sure what he did but now it will not boot into windows at all and says it is a non dos partition on fdisk.

What if anything can i do to recover all his data.He was doing alot with digital photos and writing a small book. He has countless hours into this and realy needs his data.

 

[CTho9305]

you'll get more equally-good answers faster in the "Operating Systems" forum, or maybe tech support

 

[Nothinman]

If you have Partition Magic it comes with a partition editor, you can change the type back to FAT32 and see if it'll read it then.

 

[subflava]

It's hard to say what the problem is without knowing exactly what it is that he did. However, it's best to do as little as possible until you're sure what you're doing to increase your chances of being able to recover from whatever is wrong.

One simple thing to try is for him to use create a Win98 boot disk and use it to boot his machine. Then he can see if the C: drive and its contents are readable.

Also, as nothinman has already said, this doesn't really belong in this forum.

 

[CdnMade]

i would think that this is beyond the average tech which would make this form the right place for it. or what else can a highly technical forum be used for. Open your maind and think. I know this is not a easy fix but i am pretty suer it can be

 

[johnlog]

If your C: drive MBR has become corrupted but it was OK before one way to cure that problem easily if you are still using FAT32. Using Norton Utilities 2001 or 2002 create its EMERGENCY boot disks. Usually is three 1.44 disks.

Boot up with the NU Emergency disk. Select to fix the MBR from the menu. It will fix the MBR in a second or two.

This only works if you had created those NU Emergency disks before you had a problem because on those Emergency disks your MBR and BIOS settings are saved. So it is super easy to fix the MBR. If you lost your BIOS settings you can use the Emergency disks to reset the BIOS in a couple seconds to what it was.

 

[spoma]

the simplest way to fix would be take harddrive out and put in your computer(assuming it can read an NTFS partition) and then copy data over to your harddrive. after this reformat his harddrive and create an extended partition for the data and copy it back. then put his harddrive back into his pc and reinstall windows onto it.
there are obviously better ways to fix things but if you can't boot inot windows and don't know what he did this might be the best way to go. plus then he is getting a clean install of the os.

 

[LiquidCyanide]

the various versions of windows have always had difficulty seeing other versions partition types, try a Me boot disk, then a 95 boot disk, then a 98 boot disk, and whatever else until it works.
ALSO PROBABLY THE PROBLEM
If your friend has Ez-Bios installed (allows you to use large capacity hard drives on older hardware) the drive will not be read correctly at all if Ez-Bios is not loaded off its home on track one of the drive. Go to the hard drive manufacturer's website and look for the image of the easy install boot disk and boot off that and remove Ez-Bios. His mobo should pick up large drives if it was built after like 99-00 without (evil) ez-bios.