Hi,

Our last remaining win98 SE computer at home has an 80 gig Western
Digital hard drive and was in the process of being dual-booted with win
xp home, when a series of interlocking incompetences resulted in having
the win xp recovery console rewrite the master boot record. Those too
young to have had to deal with win 98 will not realize that this is a
_very bad thing_.  Since win 98 came about in the days of small hard
drives, in order for something like the 80 gig hard drive to be fully
seen by the os, there had to be installed some disk management software
that made the hard drive appear to have a different structure than it
really had. The essential info about that lived in the MBR. 

Win xp is smart enough to live without that crutch and so its MBR is
incompatible with the way the disk manager software had organized the
disk, and thus the information on the disk (two partitions worth, the
win 98 system and a data partition) are unreadable now. 

I'm hoping that someone on the list will have heard of such a problem
(we can't be the first to have mis-done something like this) and can
advise. Now the disk management software that came with the disk has
been superceded, apparently, by a WD utility call DDO (Dynamic Disk
Overlay) which may or may not have the same functionality.

What I hope is: a) WD's disk management software (either the original,
I have the floppy, or DDO) can be installed without formatting the
drive, making the files readable, and b) once it's in place, that there
is some software that can examine the disk to determine the original
partitioning. 

If someone on the list can advise, I will be ever so appreciative.
Luckily, the data on the drives in question was reasonably well
backed-up, so the disaster isn't as bad as it might have been.

Thanks,

Living in fond hope,

Lou Smogor 

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com