[pchelpers] Re: fat32 repair utilities

Hello Greg-O-Ree,

Thursday, September 19, 2002, 12:54:22 AM, you wrote:

GOR> I was just going to reinstall win98 on one of my confusers and I get an
GOR> error message from scandisk that there is a FAT error and scandisk cannot
GOR> repair the problem.  As a result I cannot reinstall win98 without possibly
GOR> reformatting or repartitioning at this moment.  So my question is:  If
GOR> anyone has run across a simple fat32 repair utility that restores the FAT
GOR> from the secondary copy?  Since it seems to me that I heard once that that
GOR> was one of the improvements of fat32 over fat16.

Check  the  error  message  very  carefully; it may be indicating that
there's a bad spot on the hard drive.

As  I  recall,  Scandisk  is  quite  capable  of restoring the primary
copy  of the FAT from  the  secondary copy; this is in FAT16 also.  If
it  has  not tried to  do, then that means that either both copies are
identical, or else it's a bad spot on the drive.

Chances  are, copying the FAT will "fix" the bad-spot problem, if that
is   what  it  is.  I must admit, though, that I don't know offhand of
any  utilities  to  copy  one FAT over another, although you might try
going  to  http://www.simtel.net and searching for one (make sure that
it says that it supports FAT32).

If  you  have  or  can  borrow  another  hard  drive,  you  could copy
everything across and then back again. You'll get an error on whatever
file  is  recorded  on  the bad spot, if any, and, unfortunately, most
utilities  don't  recover  from  that  well, which is why I always use
XCOPY  from within a DOS window to do this copying. This command works
well  for  me:  XCOPY  C:\*.* D:\ /C/H/E/K/D/Y (assuming that C is the
source  and  D is the destination).  I'd try a FAT copy utility first,
though.

-- 
Best regards,
 Scott                            mailto:Wizard@xxxxxxxx

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