Wierd HDD Problem - Any ideas?!

[The Donut]

Hey guys,

A friend of mine set me an e-mail about a problem he was having, was just curious if anyone else could shed some light!

> One of the hard disk drives is not working in XP. Although the drive
> is shown in Windows Explorer the drive label isn't, and when you click
> on the drive a message is displayed asking if you want to format the
> disk. Oh well it's buggered I thought, but when I boot up the system
> with a Windows 98 start-up disk I can see the drive; the label, all
> the directories and files (although only in DOS format, i.e. filenames
> are in 8.3 format)
>
> Tried loads of things, including:
> Downloaded a disk tester from Hitachi (it's an Hitachi drive) which is
> suppose to test the drive and it's mechanics - passed with flying
> colours
> Ran DOS based scandisk - all OK expect that a problem is reported with
> long filenames - doesn't say what the problem is or how to fix it. No
> bad sectors are found.
> Tried to run scandisk in XP - doesn't do anything.
> Moved the disk to another machine - problem persists.
>

 

[DougLite]

Tell him to get back into XP, Start\Run\Diskmgmt.msc, right click the partition, delete it, then create a new one. Now, if he actually wants the data off of the drive, then things are a little more complicated. GetDataBack can help there.

 

[The Donut]

Yes, he does want the data off the drive. But, thanks for the help!

 

[PCMonkey]

If you can use a 98 Start-up disk, then you can just copy files over to a folder on the working drive as another option. I imagine some of the names are too long for DOS so it truncates them with a "~1". To get around that you can use wildcards. (e.g. i want to copy a file battlefield2demo.exe., but DOS doesn't give me the entire filename. With the * wildcard i can copy it to another folder like this.)

C:\> copy battle*.exe F:\Backup

The same can be done if you want to copy all files in a given folder. Use a wildcard to copy everything with any extension and any filename.

C:\> copy *.* F:\backup