On Sat, 24 Feb 2001 00:36:44 -0500, you wrote:

>Date:    Thu, 22 Feb 2001 23:11:01 -0500
>From:    Demetri Kolokotronis <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: H.D. Failure
>
>I have a hard drive that I have problem accessing as FAT is corrupted. Is
>there a program I might try to see if can get drive working enough to
>transfer data? I bought a CDRW for making backups, but, unfortunately, it
>didn't work, and the hard drive went out before I received return
>authorization on CDRW. Scandisk stops, giving FAT error message,Win98.

>Demetri Kolokotronis

Scandisk can actually be a fairly destructive program.

There are three tools I know of that might well help your situation.

1. Spinrite  This can fix or recover many a failed or failing hard
drive without destroying data.. I have used it in some hopeless cases.
Read about it at   www.grc.com . Its easy to use but costs $89. Its
available  download only. 

2. Powerquest Lost and Found.  Somewhat clunky to use this  powerful
utility works after booting from DOS floppy to recover files even if
the FAT is damaged.  it will analyze the drive and show you a tree of
files. You can cause them to be recovered to another drive. Powerquest
no longer sells this product but it is still in stores and elsewhere.

3. Ranish Partition Manager or more precisely his free program plus a
disk  hex editor and some of the tools mentioned or linked  on his
page  http://www.users.intercom.com/~ranish/part/
This is not an easy solution though since your problem probably needs
immediate detailed low level knowledge of partitions and file systems

Its always possible that your problem was caused by something "simple"
like writing to the drive when BIOS recognized it as a different
geometry.

His program and the info on his page would probably very much interest
the service people on this list.

Mark Paulson

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