Can i retreieve my partition?

[antdickens]

I have recently tried to organise my pc by splitting my drive into three partitions.
One has windows 98 on (drive c, one has windows xp pro on (drive d), the other is space i use for storage (drive e.

This was all working fine until this morning, on boot up i selected the option to boot into windows xp and received an error saying windows cannot boot due to a problem with a hard drive and it cannot find the files it needs to load. When i tap a key the system reboots.
I can boot into windows 98 fine and using fdisk /status does display the partitions in their correct sizes. Although it does not display drive letters next to what should be drive d:and e:.

Any idea how i could recover the data from these partitioins or even make them active again so i could use them as before.

All help greatly appreciated!

 

[wolluf]

You could try XP's recovery console & run chkdsk (if recovery console can find the installation)

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;307654.

Or free data recovery app -

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

Are the partitions fat32? Are they logical drives in extended partition or primary partitions?

(I'd recommend use of primary partitions - I've lost drives in extended ones too many times).

 

[dick1234]

DEAR WOLLUF,

CAN TWO OR MORE PRIMARY PARTITIONS BE MADE ON ONE HARD DRIVE?

OR DO YOUN SUGGEST JUST ONE PRIMARY OF 50 GIG?

DICK

PS IS THERE A SPELL CHECK ON THIS FORUM?

 

[wolluf]

Dick - you can have up to 4 primary partitions on one hard drive (or up to 3 primary and one extended, which can be split into 20+ logical drives). Whether you have one or several partitions is down to you - your usage of machine (eg, some people like to keep all their 'data' - pictures, documents, music, videos etc on a separate partition. Then if they need/want to reinstall operating system or install new one, they can do so without disturbing this data partition).