Member Avatar for shadow_knight

I am running windows 98 se on my computer and I had the FAT get corrupted on my first hard drive. So I repartioned it and formated it and reloaded Window onto it. Now I am unable to access the second hard drive through windows. The drive shows up under bios but I have not checked if it is found under Dos yet. I really need to find a way to access the information on this drive it is extremely important.

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For : stop using the machine and avoid any writes to the problem disk. Every write lowers the chance of a clean recovery. The safest workflow is: (1) preserve the disk by imaging it, (2) work on the image, (3) attempt recovery on the image rather than the original drive.

Hardware checks first: verify the IDE/PATA/SATA cable and power connector and try the drive in a different machine or an external USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter. If the drive is intermittently visible on another host you can copy critical files off immediately to a healthy disk.

Create a sector-by-sector image before trying repairs. A robust tool is GNU ddrescue; imaging preserves the current state even if there are bad sectors. Example two-step approach:

ddrescue -f -n /dev/sdX disk-image.img disk-image.log
ddrescue -d -r3 /dev/sdX disk-image.img disk-image.log

Run recovery tools against the image, not the original. TestDisk can often restore a lost partition table or make a partition visible again; PhotoRec can carve files when the filesystem is damaged. If the image process fails because of hardware errors, repeat attempts with conservative ddrescue options and consider powering the drive down between tries to avoid overheating.

Following , if the root cause is the running environment rather than the disk itself, booting a modern rescue system (USB live distro or dedicated rescue toolkit) or attaching the drive to a different, newer machine will bypass many host-side limits and let you extract data.

References and tools:

If the drive makes unusual noises, smells, or fails repeatedly, stop and consult a professional recovery service to avoid further permanent damage.

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Member Avatar for Member #2466

How big is the drive and what did you format it to (i.e. FAT32? FAT16? NTFS?). Remember that Win98 won't detect large drives so you might have to repartition into smaller partitions first before it detects.

Member Avatar for shadow_knight

I do believe that it is FAT 32. The first drive is 15 gb and the second is 6 gb

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