On Fri, 27 Sep 2002 13:57:04 +0100, "Richard Hamilton-Frost" <rich@xxxxxxxxx> wrote > a win9x question, one of my pc's has gone a bit screwy!! Actually, a more basic question than that. If FDISK does not see any partitions, then the partition table has been overwritten or otherwise messed up. If it cleanly shows no partitions, as though the disk has never been partitioned, then the partition table has been zeroed out. In that case, the master boot record may have also been zeroed, and I don't know what else. You can look at the partition table with Norton Disk Editor. There are a few websites (searchable with Google et al.) that can tell you what the partition table should contain. That might be more helpful than Norton's Partition Table View, which tells how IT interprets what the partition table contains. If you have (that is, had) a C: drive as a primary partition that starts at the beginning of the drive, with no free space (the normal way of setting up a disk), and you know roughly how big it is, and the partition table appears hopelessly trashed, you can patch the partition table to show a partition in the right place with approximately (but no more than) the original size of the partition. That should at least give you the C: drive. First see if you can access if from a floppy boot, then try to make it bootable. If I knew exactly what FDISK does, I would say you could do this with FDISK: just create the partition as you knew it existed. I know FDISK doesn't format the partition it creates, but I don't know whether it leaves the data space unchanged. If that still leaves C: inaccessible, then something else has been messed up, maybe the master boot record, or the boot sector of C:, or the FAT, or the root directory -- in that order, from the beginning of the drive, except that the partition table is actually at the end of the sector that contains the master boot record. FDISK /MBR will restore a standard master boot record. I don't remember exactly what happened when my own first primary partition got messed up. I know I did FDISK /MBR, and I also know that the partition table had the correct numbers, but I had to fix up some of the partition type codes. After that, systems that booted from partitions after the first worked just fine. I don't know what else I might have done to make the first partition visible from a floppy boot, but at that point I could see that the root directory was pure junk. Good luck, and I hope somebody else gives you some advice that's easier to follow than mine (and at least as reliable). Marty Martin B. Brilliant at home in Holmdel, NJ -- To unsubscribe, send a message to ecartis@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe calmira_tips" in the body. OR visit //freelists.org