Seagate drive - lost Windows directory when slave was set as master.

[Fred Rone]

I was installing as Slave a newly formatted Maxtor drive, and forgot to set the Slave jumper, encountered a "System detects SMART failure on drive 0" error and now the primary drive is corrupted, with no Windows Directory, just a file0000.chk with over 1 GB in it.
Now I can boot to the drive, but only to a DOS prompt, after running FDISK to set the primary partition on the old Seagate drive as active.
Is there anyway to rescue the Seagate drive, or should I just give up?
Fred...

[Mic V.]

Fred,

It may depend on the type of filesystem you had on it; I seem to recall that FAT filesystems could be recovered from some relatively catastrophic-seeming issues.

If it's really important, there are always companies who specialize in data recovery; it just costs.

But if you don't get answers here, you may want to post to the Microsoft forum.

Good luck,
Mic

[Elliot Kuchinsky]

It sounds like you went a little further than what you say. I seem to remember a "Convert lost strings to files?" That file0000.chk probably has your Windows directory in it but because FAT has been modified it, it is big $ or time to get it out. Fixing the barn door after the horse is gone - when ever we add an extra windows disk - we "ghost" the primary first - on a spare bench HDD - to insure no problems. Cheap insurance.

Elliot