Member Avatar for shadow_knight

I keep getting and error message saying unable to write to the c: drive. I have already replaced the IDE cable and it has had no effect on the problem. Is there any solution to the problem short of replacing the hard drive.

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later reported that a corrupted FAT was the root cause. Replies from and correctly pointed toward using alternate boot media and disk utilities; what follows is a concise, prioritized recovery checklist and prevention notes for similar write-error symptoms.

First priority: stop any further writes to the affected volume. Boot the machine from external media (boot floppy, rescue CD, or a Linux live environment) or remove the drive and attach it as a secondary to a working system. Create a sector-level image of the drive before attempting repairs so the original remains untouched; imaging preserves recoverable data and permits multiple repair attempts. On a Linux rescue system, GNU ddrescue is useful because it logs progress and tolerates bad sectors:

ddrescue -n /dev/sdX drive.img drive.log
ddrescue -r3 /dev/sdX drive.img drive.log

Run filesystem-repair tools against the image first. For FAT volumes, utilities that can rebuild the FAT are preferable; if the table cannot be rebuilt, use file-carving tools to extract data from the image. If the drive exhibits clicking, long seek noises, or many bad sectors (or SMART reports failures), stop DIY repair attempts and consider professional imaging—continued writes or aggressive scans can make recovery harder.

Prevention and follow-up: verify drive health with manufacturer diagnostics or SMART tools, replace drives that show many reallocated or pending sectors, keep regular image-based backups for system volumes, use a UPS to avoid sudden power loss, and secure data cables and connectors. The quick checks suggested by and the KB pointer mentioned by are appropriate for initial diagnosis, but imaging-first is the safest path to recover data and limit loss.

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Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

Do you know what caused this? What Windoze OS are you running? Is this DOS?

If the drive is coming up that you can see it, I doubt it would be the IDE interface. SOmething else is at work, and probably not a good thing.

I would be surprised if Windows will even boot, because it likes to write temp files out to the drive, and because of the swapfile needing to be initialized.

If you have DOS around, see if you can access it (assuming it is not an NTFS Drive). You can also try loading up in Safe Mode. Check to see if the drive is full. Check the system logs to see if it is reporting system errors.

Christian

Member Avatar for shadow_knight

I am using windows 98 se. it is able to boot windows fully but the blue screen saying can not write to c: drive does popup a few times during loading but once windows is loaded you can't do much of anything with the computer because the blue screen pops up and the computer locks up.

Member Avatar for Rueful Rogue

I'm assuming you have access to another PC since you are posting here. So try going to this site for instructions which may be of help. This article will help you do a "clean boot" and/or start up in the "safe mode" in Win98, and will tell you what to do if these do not work. There's a lot of links in this article with a lot of info, so it's not something I can paste here. Go to:

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

If the link above does not help you, I would definately find a DOS startup floppy, and load that in the A: then run some chkdsk/scandisk utilities to see what is up. It is also possible that the hard disk volume is full.

Christian

Member Avatar for shadow_knight

Found the Problem FAT was corupted

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