By Nate Heasley (Nheasley) on Tuesday, September 09, 2003 - 01:53 pm:

Installing some new AOL email software on a friend's PC. System crashed, wouldn't boot. Reistalled componants of Windows 98, finally got the system working basically in the proper way. Tried (stupidly) to install program again. System crashed, and reinstall of Win98 deleted all programs, documents and settings from previous install. Upside is now the drive has a lot of space.

So am I totally fucked? What can I do to get the docs back?

By Mark Crane (Mecran01) on Tuesday, September 09, 2003 - 01:59 pm:

That's nasty. I vote for totally fscked, unless you want to mail the hard drive somewhere and have them whip out the electron microscope.

By Jay Townsend (Artdog) on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 01:25 am:

Hey Nate, your friend doesn't own one of Mark's second-hand laptops does he?

By Nate Heasley (Nheasley) on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 10:46 am:

Heh. No, thank goodness. Things would no doubt be even worse.

I've got a copy of EasyRecovery working right now on the machine, and it seems to be doing the trick. It's a very tedious process to recovery this data, made worse by the fact that ER works from a RAM drive that on a 64 (?) MB Celeron machine is just incredibly slow and keeps having to be reset.

If it resets again I'm thinking of popping the drive out and putting it in the replacement PC we got that has XP and a 2.4 ghz chip with 512 mb RAM. I figure if I boot off the CD I should be able to access both HD's and recovery the bad one, then simply transfer the files to the new HD and dump the old. Anyone recommend against that? I suppose one problem might be that the old drive is FAT...

By Tim Tate (Tatertot) on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 12:24 pm:

XP should be able to see the FAT drive just fine. If you were going the other direction, plopping a NTFS drive into a Win9x system, you'd have trouble.

By Nate Heasley (Nheasley) on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 12:41 pm:

Any ideas about the jumper on the old drive? If I hook it up to the slave connection, do I need to put a jumper on, or will it just look at the first drive as master and the second as slave? I have a jumper (actually the old drive is already jumpered on the first two pins) but I don't have a config diagram for the pins. It's a western digital 64AA

By Tim Tate (Tatertot) on Wednesday, September 10, 2003 - 08:42 pm:

I think most drives will act as a slave if you have no jumpers at all. I won't bet on that, though.

By Nate Heasley (Nheasley) on Thursday, September 11, 2003 - 05:19 am:

I decided ultimately not to chain the drives, and instead just plug in the old drive. Worked great, except that I'm still getting system freezes with the software. I think it's time to hand it over to a pro...this has taken far too much of my time and my sanity over the last three days.