Help with Windows 98 Sector not found

[davexnet02]

Hello,
this is the format of my drive:

windows 95 (Hidden primary, 1 GB fat32)
Windows 98 (Active primary 9 GB fat32)
Windows 2000 (Logical 4 GB, NTFS)

This drive is on a Promise ultra66.

Boot up gives me win2k boot loader menu, with the choice of
Windows 98 and Win2k. Win2k boots up fine.
However, if I boot up 98, the 98 logo briefly flashes, I see
the contents of the autoexec.bat on the screen and then:
Sector not-found reading drive c:
Abort, retry, ignore, fail.

When win2k is booted, I can see the C: partiton and all
of 98's files look present and are accessible.

I booted from the 98 floppy and attempted to run scandisk,
but it gave this warning:
"Scandisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C. The cluster
is either damaged or your system is not configured properly.
Drive C may need to have LBA enabled, or the disk partition may be
incorrectly marked as non-LBA."

I've a small utility (from partition magic I think) that flips
the hidden and active bits enabling me to switch to a direct boot
of windows 95 or 98/2k menu.
The 95 partition has a few games which my son plays.
Yesterday, this partition had a problem and I had to restore
from a recent backup. This is the first time I've ever restored
and the program used was Acronis Trueimage. Windows 95
made a full recovery, but I'm wondering if there's a connection
to the problem above.

Any thoughts on how to proceed appreciated.
Dave

 

[davexnet02]

Hello,
this is the format of my drive:

windows 95 (Hidden primary, 1 GB fat32)
Windows 98 (Active primary 9 GB fat32)
Windows 2000 (Logical 4 GB, NTFS)

This drive is on a Promise ultra66.

Boot up gives me win2k boot loader menu, with the choice of
Windows 98 and Win2k. Win2k boots up fine.
However, if I boot up 98, the 98 logo briefly flashes, I see
the contents of the autoexec.bat on the screen and then:
Sector not-found reading drive c:
Abort, retry, ignore, fail.

When win2k is booted, I can see the C: partiton and all
of 98's files look present and are accessible.

I booted from the 98 floppy and attempted to run scandisk,
but it gave this warning:
"Scandisk cannot read from the last cluster on drive C. The cluster
is either damaged or your system is not configured properly.
Drive C may need to have LBA enabled, or the disk partition may be
incorrectly marked as non-LBA."

I've a small utility (from partition magic I think) that flips
the hidden and active bits enabling me to switch to a direct boot
of windows 95 or 98/2k menu.
The 95 partition has a few games which my son plays.
Yesterday, this partition had a problem and I had to restore
from a recent backup. This is the first time I've ever restored
and the program used was Acronis Trueimage. Windows 95
made a full recovery, but I'm wondering if there's a connection
to the problem above.

Any thoughts on how to proceed appreciated.
Dave

This is a curious situation. I booted safemode in 98,
but that gave me an immediate message about himem.sys
and dblbuff.sys being missing or corrupted.

Went back to win2k and viewed the c: drive, those files
were there and looked OK. I think these errors were
more symptoms rather that their face value.

I took a gamble and booted up partition magic 8 from the
floppies. It checked the c: partition and found no errors.
I then used pm 8 to resize the partition; I adjusted both
the start end locations slightly because I wanted PM
to rewrite the start and ending sector address in the Partition
Table. This ended without incident, and I can now successfully
boot safemode and I'm doing a full scandisk now.

I'm wondering if my whole problems were caused by malware -
my son was visiting some dodgy site in windows 95 trying to
find some cheats on some games he had. It was obvious that some
of those sites were trying to load activex and goodness knows
what else. The windows 95 problems started right after that.

Could also be possible that the computer needs a good clean;
it's hot and dusty and I'm pretty sure the PC is running warmer.

Any thoughts on this PM 8 fix?
Dave

 

[davexnet02]

I took a gamble and booted up partition magic 8 from the
floppies. It checked the c: partition and found no errors.
I then used pm 8 to resize the partition; I adjusted both
the start and end locations slightly because I wanted PM
to rewrite the start and ending sector address in the Partition
Table. This ended without incident, and I can now successfully
boot safemode and I'm doing a full scandisk now.

I had a successful outcome. Full operation, no lost
data. For now, it's OK, but I sure would like to know what
happened.

Dave