Hard Drive Troubleshooting

[nightwalkerxt]

() Hard Drive Troubleshooting ()

Hi! I have the following configuration:

two computers:
"new" one:
Pentium 4, with a 40 GB Western Digital HD running Win XP Pro

"old" one:
Pentium 4, with a 20 GB Western Digital HD running Win 98.

I also have:

an old Samsung 1 GB HD (I only can safelly use about 600 MB of it because of damaged sectors)

a SanDisk 1 GB USB Flash Drive.

a Seagate 200 GB External USB/Fire Wire Hard Drive.

Now... my 20 GB HD is partitioned in two units one of 5 GB with the OS (and some of my important files) and other of 15 GB with the rest of my important files.

I manged to move most of my files into the partition of the 20 GB disk and the 1 GB disk while I still could access my old computer.

I was able to boot the P3 with the 20 GB and 1 GB disk until recently, when it just hanged and I wasnt able to enter win 98 anymore.

I've tracked down the problem to my 20 GB disk:
I booted my P3 using the Win 98 CD, when I scandisk the 20 GB drives it says something about the FAT and that it can't fix the drive.

When I try to load win 98 it ends up (after a long wait) giving up some error about the hymem.sys file, I googled for it and the solution is to edit some line refering to the ifhlp.sys file, but when I use edit.com to edit the file I try to save the changes and I get another error.

I then hooked up the 20 GB drive into my P4, I was able to boot win xp from my 40 GB drive and access the big partition of the drive, the small one raises an error when I try to access the unit, I'm moving the files from the big partition of the 20 Gb HD into my External 200 GB HD, but in doing so it the system becomes unstable.

So now I sometimes can access only the big partition on my 20 GB drive hooked in my P4, I haven't been able to access the small partition in the same way though..

The only way I can see the contents of both partitions is when I boot the P3 on DOS, and I acces the drive units using shell commands like dir and such...

I'd like any sugestion so I can fix this, I need to get the files out of the 20 GB drive first (in both partitions), after that I'll format and repartition it...

Right now I'm thinking about using some sort of DOS based utility to browse throwh my files on my P3 and copy them to the 1 GB drive that hasn't problems on both computers... I remember I used to use a norton program to do this on DOS but I don't remember wich one...

I also tryed downloading a demo of PartirtionMagic (haven't used it before though) on my P4 and tryed to run it while having the 20 GB HD plugged but I just managed to hang the P4.

Another thing when I plug the 20 GB HD into the P4 sometimes it boots and sometimes it doesn't, and sometimes reboots by itself.

Any suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

[anarchon]

Your log is to complex. So i'll try to answer without trying to decrypt what you wrote.
You might want to use a Knoppix cd to boot from cd and access your drives that way ? you can move your files from one drive to another then.

 

[nightwalkerxt]

Your log is to complex. So i'll try to answer without trying to decrypt what you wrote.
You might want to use a Knoppix cd to boot from cd and access your drives that way ? you can move your files from one drive to another then.

I tryed using the win 98 cd to boot, I'm able to access both partitions of my 20 GB drive via DOS, but it's kind of difficult browsing that way... this knoppix cd boots my system in linux right?, from there you think I can use the GUI to access my drive?