At 09:15 AM 09/19/1999 , you wrote:
>Hi
>
>I have just tried to install a new HD. My attempts have failed, Windows
>refuses to acknoledge the new HD.
>It seems however that after much fiddling with FDisk and formating that I
>have now lost the contents of one of the (compressed) partitions of my
>original HD, although how I manged that I have no idea as I was careful to
>ensure I only used FDisk on the 2nd drive and only formatted the F: drive
>which is the letter asigned to the new drive.
>
>Does anyone know how I can recover my E: ?
>And also does anyone know how I can get this new HD to work ?
>
>**PC Info**
>Award BIOS (1996)
>Pentium 100mhz
>32mb RAM
>1 Gig EIDE Western Digital HD (original drive) Master
>-C:\ (Compressed, 200mb)
>-D:\ (Compressed, 412mb)
>-E:\ (Compressed, 412mb)
>4 Gig EIDE Western Digital HD (new HD) Slave
>8x CD-ROM (2nd Master)
>
>Thanks
>Kevin Hains


I believe you problem is a lack of understanding how Microsoft products
like MS Dos and Windows handles drive letter assignments.  In as such,
when you formatted what you believed to be the new drive, setting at
what you thought was drive F, you actually formatted your former drive
E, which became drive F with the install of the new drive.

How did this happen?
When Dos assigns drive letters, it assigns the first primary partition on
the primary master drive as "C", then it assigns the primary slave drive's
primary partition as "D".  After this, it assigns the extended partitions on
the primary master as E and F.  So, when you formatted F, it was the
partition you know cannot read.

Windows95/98 has the ability to reassign drive letters, though it can
be VERY problematic and I do not recommend it, as just this sort
of problem can arise.

Decision time
You can recover your data.  It will require special software to recover
from a full format of the partition, these are the best two on the market
for the purpose:

You can get a copy of Lost & Found from Powerquest to recover the data
one the drive at:  http://www.powerquest.com   (these are the same people
who sell Partition Magic).

You can get a copy of Tiramisu from Ontrack:  http://www.ontrack.com
it does the same job as Lost & Found, except it costs a lot more.

Sorry, I cannot give you a better answer, but this looks like a tough one.


                 Bob Wright
        The NOSPIN Group, Inc
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org

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