FAT corrupted?

[apimom]

WIN 98 SE

Removable harddrive - should be less than 30% full

accessing files problems off and on.

3 days ago no accessing files anymore but drive shows as letter G, directories visible. Drive shows completely full. Checked with XP machien and disk management and it shows no FAT or FAT32 (empty space where this info should be)

Added recently a USB 2.0 card to 98 SE computer but this seemed to work for a few days ok.

Running FDISK /MBR on an XP machine show drive not accessible.

Any suggestions to retrieve files as this is an overflow storage disk. Otherwise if I wipe and re-format what could have caused it in the first place and how do I prevent it possibly in the future.

Any suggestions appreciated.

apimom

[jmtjet]

Sounds like the drive may be failing. Depending on the make of your drive you can get a diagnostic tool from the manufacturers website. The tool will tell you if your drive has gone bad. As far as data recovery you can try this program;

http://www.pcinspector.de/smart_media_recovery/uk/welcome.htm

I've used it with mixed results. If you try to recover your data, recover to a large partition or a second drive. Also, it takes a long time to run and will recover megabytes of data. Good luck.

[apimom]

Thanks for the reply. I decided to wipe it. I just try to figure out how to avoid this in the future. Apparently the harddrive content kept duplicating itself to max capacity of the harddrive.


apimom

[jmtjet]

There are virii that will do that. Wiping the drive will get rid of any virus that you may have had. I'd still run the diagnostic tool on it just to check the integrity of the drive before you install an operating system. Hope this helps. :)