Scandisk/defrag

[xoc]

My os is w98se.

I have (or had) two hard drives,1x2gb and 1x8gb.

The 2gb drive is partitioned and original drives were listed as C&D.

However when I installed the 8 gb drive some four years ago, this became the D drive and the original d drive became the E drive.

Everything was fine until I decided to scandisk and defrag my drives.

Was succesful with the C drive and scanned the D drive OK but could not defrag the D drive. It kept hanging up.

So last night I tried again, having first gone into setup and disabled the powersystem and gone into msconfig to untick startup group,all of this in the belief that some program had been writing to and causing the hangup.

Scandisk appeared to go OK ( I started it and left to do something else and on return computer was back to desktop,so assumed no problems found)

Started Defrag on D drive ,watched til it got to 13% then left it to carry on.

Upon my return, 4 hours later, it still appeared to be OK at 52%. Left it again, made a coffee, returned to note that it was still at 52%.

Clicked for details and found that it was just clicking away on the one block with no movement .Tried everything to see if it would move on, paused it ,restarted and eventually stopped it , shut down and went to bed.

This morning, started up, went to have breakfast as per usual routine,

checked my emails OK, downloaded something requiring win zip, error message, "can't find winzip" looked for it manually and discoverd that my D drive was gone! Double clicked my computer and find only C and dE drives but no D drive.

Will now go back into setup and check if I have disabled something in error,but have my doubts and feel the problem goes back to my repeated efforts to defrag D drive which incidentally is not partitioned!.

Any help welcome.

Xoc

[Guest Timeforabeer]

Hi xoc..

I had some similar problems to yours on an old 40 GB maxtor drive.

If i get some of my assumptions wrong ..I sure someone will correct me and put you right....

Firstly..I think on the drive letters issue..I think it's because windows 98 assigns the "active" partitions of both hard disks to the first available letters (ie C:/ to the active partition on the master drive on the primary ide slot and D:/ to any other hard disk with an active partition set as slave on primary ide or master on second ide slot) Any other partitions then follow logically.

eg..

If you have two 10 GB hard disks,both set as masters on two ide slots..both with two 5GB partitions, It would look something like this....

ide 1... 1st partition (5GB active) = c:/

2nd partion (5GB) = e:/

ide 2... 1st partition (5GB active) =d:/

2nd partition (5Gb) =f:/

Hope that makes some sense.

Secondly.... The reason i think you have lost your d:/ drive is because you have lost the partition info...

I was having this problem on my maxtor drive (I still don't know why it happened) which had 4 X 10Gb partitions on it.

The workaround i found(stumbled on) was to put a small partition (200meg) as the active partition (first) and not put anything on it.

This way ,I could use the rest of the hard disk and not lose any info..

Hope this helps.. :)