I had a perfectly working PC with XP Pro installed on a 160Gb Maxtor HDD. For no reason I error checked the hard drive, which the system did after rebooting, at the end of the test the system rebooted and announced that there was a error on the boot and boot.ini. Useing XP Emergency (on disk) I tried fixmbr which did nothing then I tried Fixboot. XP found the drive identified it as FAT and said that it was successfully fixed. The drive was FAT and is now unusable. Partition Magic sees it as a FAT drive as does XP when I switched the HDD into another machine. I have a couple of file recovery programs which see this drive as FAT and will not show up any files. I tried a demo of Partition Table Doctor 3.0 which sees it as NTFS drive and claims it can rebuild the table to make this work again, but being a demo will not do it until I pay $49 I have checked various reviews and the only positive ones seem to have been left by the same person (The broken english is the same on them all.) So I am very dubious to hand over the cash. I need the files on this HDD desperately, theres alot of crucial stuff there since my last backup which I do do (but not as often as I should have!) I have booted using a Live Linux CD (Knoppix) and that shows as a FAT there too and I do not have any expertise with QPART or Linux either really. My question to you lovely people is.... Anyone used PTD 3.0 and can honestly recommend it for this problem, or if anyone has any other suggestions to that this drive can be called NTFS rather than FAT without a format? The drive was not converted to FAT just the partition table adjusted as far as I can see. I need something that does the same as fixboot but the opposite to switch it back to NTFS, hopefully with file system intact. Those of you familiar with partionmagic might want to know that textually it claims I have only used 6.8Mb of the drive but graphically the bar goes to the percentage of the drive that I had actually used. (It reports the total size correctly, but as the others thinks its FAT rather than NTFS) I can access the drive when piggybacked on another ststem using XP but its all gobble-de-gook Thanks for reading........ over to you......
on partition magic there is an option to convert partitions. have u tried to convert the partition showing a FAT to NTFS??? you wont lose any data. it is worth a try.
Thanks Andy I tried it, it would only give me the option to go from FAT12 to FAT32. Problem is obsolete now (as of two hours ago) as I retrieved all files i wanted using File Scavenger and then went for the format. For anyone else finding this problem here, it is worth trying ptedit found on the Partition magic boot floppy and editing the table structure from there. Take the settings from a working drive and then adapt it to the size of your own hard drive (probably easier said than done mind you) Thanks again Andy for replying.
