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Disappearing partitions


seasider28
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Hi, I'm new to this so please bear with me. My problem may be similar to the partition hell-ish recently posted, but I'm not sure. I have a stand-alone 98se system which I built at Christmas. I bought an 80Gb disc which I partitioned into 4 x 20Gb partitions and installed 98se to drive C. A couple of days ago, the boot stopped with messages about vnetsup.vxd, vredir.vxd and dfs.vxd. By pressing Enter, Windows eventually loaded. I decided to reinstall Windows by overwriting the existing version but have obviously done something wrong as I can't see my remaining partitions. I loaded the hard drive in another system which shows all 4 partitions in Explorer but, when I try to access them, each says "[drive]:\ is not accessible. A device attached to the system is not functioning". My last backup was 2 weeks ago (I know - you don't need to tell me!) so I need to retrieve information from one of the partitions. Will Partition Magic enable me to recover my data? If that's not likely, can anybody suggest anything else please?

Thanks

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If you dont already have one, make a windows boot disk. You can do this by going to My Computer. Right click on the floppy drive and choose format. Make sure the option to make a boot disk is checked, and click OK.

Reboot your computer with this disk in the drive and when it is finished booting, type, "fdisk" No quotes.

At the menu you can see you can create, delete, and show partition information. Press 4 to display the partition information. If there is other partitions listed there, let us know and we can try to help. After your done, remove the floppy disk and reboot.

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Thanks for replying. I ran fdisk yesterday but it seemed to be corrupted. It showed a Non-DOS partition at number 1 and a couple of entries below which obviously related to other Non-DOS partitions but didn't show correctly. I will put my disc back in the original system after work tonight and try again and let you know exactly what I see.

Thanks again.

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OK, the bits are all back inside. At least I can read the Fdisk screen now. It shows 2 partitions - number 1 is active, PRI DOS, 2047Mb, System Unknown, 19% usage. Number 2 is EXT DOS, 5985Mb, 55% usage. Looking at logical drives within extended partition shows 3 drives (E, F, G - drive D is a separate disc for ad hoc backups). These 3 drives all have System as unknown and no vol labels - they all used to have meaningful (to me) labels.

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