recovering from disk crash?

A 2.5 year old IBM 40GB disk (disk 1) died suddenly, would not boot in
the morning. It had partitions of C: Win98SE, D: XP, E: and F: data
(all but F was FAT32).

Could be worse, as I previously used a second disk (disk 2) for Ghost
image backups of three partitions of Disk 1 (and important stuff from
D: was only two days old too).

I had an old unused 8GB disk (disk 3) so after crash, I built a new XP
on it. With Disk 3 and backup disk 2 in place as slave, the plan was to
overwrite 3 with Ghost copy of D from 2 (new Disk 3 actually partitioned
C/2GB, D/6GB, thinking was D: to D. The disks work, but for some
reason, Ghost 2002 from floppy wont allow me to select new disk 3 as
Destination (to copy Image D to Partition). Sees it, but cannot
highlight it to select it, ignores click. All is FAT32, but 6GB is
probably too small to hold it.

A 120 GB disk is on the way (disk 4), but not here yet. Hopefully size
is all it will take. I have restored from Ghost before, so I am not
expecting problems.

Meanwhile, I can boot on a Win98 floppy, and can do DIR on C and E of
bad disk 1 but DIR cannot see D:. C: has some newer data copied onto
it I'd like to get. Since I can do DIR, I may be able to copy data if
I had a place to copy it to (no ethernet or size on floppy).

So, bright idea to use FDISK to mark bad disk 1 not active so I can
slave it to a new boot disk 3 or 4, and try to copy some of it.
However, FDISK from floppy simply wont see the bad disk (even if floppy
DIR can). FDISK gives table error and will not start. Any suggestions
how to try to access it as a slave?

Thanks, but I do suspect it's time to discard it and forget it.

Back up your data! (in a way you can get to it)

--
Wayne
http://www.scantips.com "A few scanning tips"