Hi everyone,
I’d really appreciate if anyone can shine some light on my problem unable to boot.
It all started last night when I tried to reinstall Windows. Naturally I’d want to format it first. So before I did that, I ran “Scandisk,” and not paying much attention to its msgs, I let it “fix errors” whenever it found any. After Scandisk ended, I rebooted and then I wasn’t able to boot anymore.
Since I haven’t changed anything I went back to Scandisk, and noticing that there’s the warning msg saying that "an NTFS system can not be checked with Scandisk or else fixing the error will make the system not bootable." However, I installed my current version of Windows 2 yrs ago and remembered that it was a FAT32, but am not sure 100%… so I am suspecting if this could be a possibility of scandisk a NTFS?
I then exited the Scandisk and tried a “dir” to list the files in C, to my surprise, it’s empty! Only saying 10G of space was free, but I know that’s wrong because I have much more space than that and that I have all sorts of folders under C it couldn’t possibly be empty.
Now that it won’t boot, I tried making C a system disk by typing “sys c: “ under DOS.
After the system files were successfully transferred, I rebooted, and tried “Dir” again, now that I see all the chkdsk.001, chkdsk.002…etc files generated by scandisk and at the end of the list, I saw some “gibberish” folder name that’s not even characters on the keyboard. I think my master boot record has been ruined by Scandisk.
I then tried “format C:” and after the line “Checking System Type,” it displayed an error msg “Invalid Device Parameters from Device Driver.” I think it couldn't recognize my C partition and its file table and hence won't let me format!!
I consider myself to be an intermediate level PC user. This 7200 RPM, 80G Seagate drive is less than a year old and I haven’t been pushing it that hard, I don’t play games, so I don’t think any physical sector damage is causing this. My question however is:
1. If it won’t let me format c via “format” command, is there another tool that’ll allow me to format the partition and reconstruct the file table to make it readable again? Partition D has all my important data, now that it’s not readable either! Is it possible to restore it once I reinstall Windows on C drive?
2. I ’ve thought about deleting partition C and recreate it, but will that do anything to my D drive?
Any help will be GREATLY appreciated!
Jeff
