On Wed, 24 Sep 2003 11:52:08 +0100, "S.Boardman"
wrote:

Help! My sister's computer (K6-450) has stopped working. The 2.4 Gb hard
drive is detected on boot by the BIOS, but will not boot. I've used a Win 98
floppy boot disk, and I can access C:. I used Partition Magic 6, and the C:
I can see is the extended partition (originally D.
Where and why has the primary partition disappeared? If I try to recreate a
C: primary partition will I lose all the data? I don't know how big the
partition were. Is there some other way of doing it? Or should I reformat
the drive (nothing critical on it - and was buggy) and reinstall everything?

The drive is likely at or near end-of-life, it would be good to buy a
new hard drive, whatever capacity the motherboard BIOS will support,
perhaps up to 32GB with original BIOS and 128GB if a supportive BIOS
update is available.

If you wish to retain the data make a backup before any changes to the
drive. Recreating a primary partition will not allow normal access to
the files, they're still there but with no FAT they can't be acessed
normally. Rather a data-recovery type program might succeed. I'm
unsure if there's a good freeware software to do recovery but Ontrack
EasyRecovery should be able to do this by copying it off to another
drive. Since you feel the installation was buggy you might want to
reinstall the OS again regardless of what can be salvaged.


Dave