Strange but true...

[cutty]

Have this ever happen to any of you guys? I had a 9gig hard drive on my PC which was running Linux on one partition and win2000 on another. I also had another drive, 30gig in there as the master running win98.

The thing is that one day I removed the linux partion and replaced it with Fat32 to tranfer some files from the drive running 98 so that I could format it. That worked fine but then after I trasnfered the data I started having a few problems. Scan disk was coming up with a few long filenames and invalid formated files, so I just did away with these files but the strangest thing happened. When I restarted the computer the files came back, I found that really strange so I figured that maybe that drive was infected with some virus but the virus checker came up blank.

The next thing to do was format that drive. I formated the drive within win98 then restarted but all data came back. I then proceeded to do the same in dos but the data still came back. So I got a Maxtor drive configurations utility to format that drive and it told me invalid boot sector therefore the drive couldn't be fomated.

What I want to know is if this is just that the drive went bad or is it virus related or is it due to some other thing?

Just wondering, any ideas or suggestions would help...

Thanks..

[rcgreen]

If the partition was originally created by linux, or a third party utility, windows may
be having trouble identifying it properly. The first thing I would try is some utility
that can totally erase the partition boot sector. Then format it again. If that doesn't
work, then it's possible that the Master boot record contradicts itself on the size info
for the partition. There is separate info for "size" and "first and last cylinder" for each
partition. There are warnings in linux documentation to be sure to create windows
partitions with windows fdisk, in order to avoid potential anomalies.

You could try running fdisk, deleting the partition, and creating it again, with the
Windows version of fdisk. In some cases, windows fdisk may not be willing to
delete a non dos partition, but since you have already been able to convert it
to FAT32, you shouldn't have trouble with it.

[bballad]

do a fdisk /mbr to rebuild the master boot record Lilo could be giving you trouble...the other poss is a boot sector virus but those are very uncommen these days.

[cutty]

Thanks rcgreen and bballad, I didn't think about rebuilding the boot sector so I will try that tonight.

I was fresh out of ideas, now I have another. I appreciate the help....

Guidance...

[cutty]

Hey rcgreen and bballad the drive is back in working order, thanks so much for your help.

I did the fdisk/mbr and then I deleted the partion and then recreated it. Then this time when I formatted the drive, everything was gone. Now my 9gig drive is no longer trash...

Thanks...