Hard drive recovery help (windows 98 hard drive

[jmxtx]

I have an old hard drive on gateway w98 system that recently crashed and will not boot up. I had a master and slave hard drive, was transferring files between the 2 and something got corrupted, error message on boot up says something something about this file transfer.

I was able to take out the slave, insert it in another computer, all data there. Master is not recognized though. I see that there is free recovery software, but I don't understand how to use it. How do I apply it to a hard drive that will not boot up on one computer or is not recognized on another. And when I say not recognized, when I make it a slave and insert it onto another computer, the computer recognizes that there is new hard ware (with pop up), but there is no E drive. This is an XP computer.

About all I know how to do here is download the recovery software, but to what, to where, and how do I apply it to the hard drive? Especially if the hard drive will not boot up. Thank you for the help.

 

[eyeCpc]

The simple solution since XP can't read Fat partitions would be to boot up with a live for cd Linux distro in order to copy+paste files from the 98 drive onto another. First you want to make up a temp folder to copy files into from the old drive provided the drive simply didn't quit on you while files were being transferred.

If the drive is still working have a look at how relatively easy it is to copy files over from it while booted with a ubuntu live cd.



Live distros like ubuntu and Knoppix will see right onto Fat as well as NTFS partitions allowing you to pick and choose which files even entire folder will be copied over from the 98 drive. That's provided the read/write heads are still in working order.

 

[Hefemeister]

xp can read fat32 partitions. perhaps there is a problem with jumper settings on the old master. set it as slave or cable select.

 

[eyeCpc]

Not if the heads are gone on the drive itself or the volume has become unreadable for some reason. The sudden crash while transferring files would seem to point at a likely drive failure for the old system.

If you can borrow or know a friend with a live disk onhand the attempt to browse and recover anything off of it while booted live would be a thought. Knowing who made the drive whether WD, Seagate, Maxtor would allow you to download drive diagnostic tools from the manufacturer as well.

 

[Hefemeister]

Not if the heads are gone on the drive itself or the volume has become unreadable for some reason. The sudden crash while transferring files would seem to point at a likely drive failure for the old system.

If you can borrow or know a friend with a live disk onhand the attempt to browse and recover anything off of it while booted live would be a thought. Knowing who made the drive whether WD, Seagate, Maxtor would allow you to download drive diagnostic tools from the manufacturer as well.

True but in that case it would not matter what file system is being used. If it is a working drive with fat32 xp can read it.

 

[eyeCpc]

Apparently XP is only seeing the hardware side detecting the drive being present. Changing the jumper setting may or may not help if the volume has lost information or there's a problem with the cable used.

One one old case the second ide drive at the time had to be set to cable select in order to gain access to a working Fat volume seeing 98 there. A bad cable on an old system is another thought since you can run into that as well.

If the drive and cable work but the partition can't be seen in XP the next step is to boot with a live distro in order to gain access to the 98 primary. Computer First Aid Using Knoppix was one article I ran into some years back you may want to review. Any recent ubuntu release will work just the same.