have missing partition/memory on my slave drive

[Jutta]

My Xp went down. Missing ntldr, spoke to support and was told to make my
drive a slave on my second comp. windows 98. Did that and can only see what
was the d side and the c does not show, no files and the memory is missing
too. Memory on the d side and files sre ok. Any help is appriciated.

 

[Jeff Richards]

The first thing to do is to make sure you have copied off any important
information that you can now see on that drive.

Note that drive letters will not be what you had when the drive was in the
other machine - the C drive will be the drive on the W98 machine you are
booting from, and the partitions on the XP drive (the slave) will be
assigned letters from D onwards. So check very carefully that you can
identify exactly what that you are looking at as the D (or E etc) drives.

It is possible (in fact, likely) that the missing partition was set up as
NTFS - Windows 98 cannot understand NTFS partitions and will not assign a
drive letter to the partition and will not be able to access it or see any
data on it. It will simply skip that partition when assigning drive
letters. You really need to install the drive as a slave in another XP
system (although there are some other options available).

It's also possible that the drive has partially failed, or perhaps the
partition information has become corrupted. You need to find and run the
disk drive diagnostic software appropriate for your brand of hard disk
drive. Check out the drive manufacturer's www site.
--
Jeff Richards
MS MVP (Windows - Shell/User)
"Jutta" <Jutta@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
news:7F12469D-94AB-4DD3-A5B3-CB28EE5F7891@microsoft.com...
> My Xp went down. Missing ntldr, spoke to support and was told to make my
> drive a slave on my second comp. windows 98. Did that and can only see
> what
> was the d side and the c does not show, no files and the memory is missing
> too. Memory on the d side and files sre ok. Any help is appriciated.

 

[Bob Harris]

I agree with the previous reply that the format of the XP partitions is probably NTFS, whihc win98 can not read by itself.

However, there are free drivers that will permit 98 to read NTFS. There are also drivers that will permit 98 to write to NTFS, but they are not free.

http://www.diskinternals.com/products/ntfs-reader/

Additionally, many modern LINUX distributions can read NTFS and some can also write it. One safe eway to try LINUX is to download and burn the free KNOPPIX CD image, burn it to a CD, boot the 98 PC into KNOPPIX, then see what it can read. By default KNOPPIX will not write to the internal hard drives, nor will it install on the internal hard drives. But, it will happily copy from internal to external (USB or firewire).

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html

Note that KNOPPIX is a big download for the CD image and even larger for the DVD image, which contains more applications. Alternative "live CDs" can be found at the link below, but not all of them can read NTFS:

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

By the way, the missing NTLDR message often can be fixed (in the XP PC) by copying NTLDR from the XP CDROM, if you have one. If you do not have an XP CDROM, then forget about this option. The XP recovery console could be used to do this:

http://www.wown.com/j_helmig/wxprcons.htm
http://www.xxcopy.com/xxcopy33.htm (near bottom)

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/win_xp_rec.htm

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058


"Jutta" <Jutta@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message news:7F12469D-94AB-4DD3-A5B3-CB28EE5F7891@microsoft.com...
> My Xp went down. Missing ntldr, spoke to support and was told to make my
> drive a slave on my second comp. windows 98. Did that and can only see what
> was the d side and the c does not show, no files and the memory is missing
> too. Memory on the d side and files sre ok. Any help is appriciated.