Problem with fixboot

[Benny Pedersen]

Hi

My computer with WinXP SP2 did not boot, so I booted
from a win98 floppy, used a DIR command and saw that all data
still exists

Then I booted from my WinXP CDROM - Repare - Tried the FIXBOOT command.
No warnings about any problems. Anyway, I then saw that FAT32 was changed
to FAT 12 and that no data could be seen using the DIR command.

Microsoft, I now want to undo the FAT32 to FAT12 thing that was
done by your FIXBOOT command, thereby see all data again using DIR ?

Benny,
PS. I sent the above news by using a Linux bootable CDROM.

 

[D.Currie]

Hi

My computer with WinXP SP2 did not boot, so I booted
from a win98 floppy, used a DIR command and saw that all data
still exists

Then I booted from my WinXP CDROM - Repare - Tried the FIXBOOT command.
No warnings about any problems. Anyway, I then saw that FAT32 was changed
to FAT 12 and that no data could be seen using the DIR command.

Microsoft, I now want to undo the FAT32 to FAT12 thing that was
done by your FIXBOOT command, thereby see all data again using DIR ?

Benny,
PS. I sent the above news by using a Linux bootable CDROM.

Interesting. Fat12 is pretty much only used on floppy disks. Offhand, I
don't know what the size limitatition is, but it's surely less than a modern
hard drive would support, so in theory, it's not possible for your drive to
be Fat12. What tool are you using to read that?

Fixboot probably wasn't the right choice to begin with, but it shouldn't
have made things worse. At this point you may need to resort to data
recovery software to get the important files backed up, then you can
continue trying to fix the drive and not worry about the data being made
less accessible than it is now.

Partition Magic (and probably others) can convert from one file system type
to another, if that's actually the problem.

By the way, if you really want to address this to Microsoft, you need to
send this to them directly, call them, whatever. This is a peer-to-peer
newsgroup, so you're talking to other users, not to MS or its
representatives.

 

[Benny Pedersen]

Interesting. Fat12 is pretty much only used on floppy disks. Offhand, I
don't know what the size limitatition is, but it's surely less than a modern
hard drive would support, so in theory, it's not possible for your drive to
be Fat12. What tool are you using to read that?

To see that, I simply used a write protected Win98 boot disk and
FDISK.

Fixboot probably wasn't the right choice to begin with, but it shouldn't
have made things worse. At this point you may need to resort to data
recovery software to get the important files backed up, then you can
continue trying to fix the drive and not worry about the data being made
less accessible than it is now.

Yes. If FIXBOOT did not made things worse, then I could simply copy
some files and then fix the boot problem.

Before the boot problem, it was FAT32.
A boot problem and FDISK could not see what file system type but DIR
could see the files.
Then I uses FIXBOOT and FDISK said FAT12 and DIR said no files.

Partition Magic (and probably others) can convert from one file system type
to another, if that's actually the problem.

I have Partition Magic on a CDROM, so I will take a look.

By the way, if you really want to address this to Microsoft, you need to
send this to them directly, call them, whatever. This is a peer-to-peer
newsgroup, so you're talking to other users, not to MS or its
representatives.

Benny,
PS. thanks.