Ok, my brother was playing a game (muppet treasure island) on my dad's pc.
The pc is older, pentium 2 333 mhz, 2.6 gig hdd... in other words, expendable crap.
Well, there are a bunch of notes he kept on the hard drive, and we currently have no way to retrieve them...
The computer will go to the windows 98 loading screen, the light for the hdd will light up constantly on the case, and then it reverts to the startup mode list... It took me a while, but I got it to boot to command prompt (safe mode), but I can't do anything from there.
The computer was never online, so there is no chance for a virus on it...
I'm just wondering if anyone has any idea what's wrong?
The first time it gave me the "continue, abort, retry, cancel" message, and others it has said either "cannot access drive c" or "drive c is not readable"
If anyone has any ideas, either reply to this or message me on aim @ acousticemoboy or on yahoo @ abc223_86
Thank you very much,
Aaron

Without more info, its hard to say for certain what is wrong, hardware or software.
I take it you ned to recover your dads notes ???

The easyest way would be to remove the hard disk drive, and place it as a second disk inside a working computer.

assuming that the hard disk is not at fault, you should be able to recover the notes.

Alternativly, use a rescue boot disk to copy or print the notes.
Knoppix would be perfect if you know anyone who has a copy laying around (ask the nerdyest friend you have, lol)

When somthing like this happens to somthing like windows98, im affraid the usual backup format reinstall procedure is required.

It does sound like you hard drive might be failing. If all you want to do is back up your files, you have a few options. I suggest start with the ideas qwijibow had. Knoppix is great for backing up files off of a bad hard drive, I have had to do it twice. Another option is BartPE, especially if you don't know Linux at all.

You hard disk may have some problmes such as bad sectors.
If this happen, no much chances for you to get the notes back.

anyway, you can try Live CD.
If you don;t have one and you have another PC, install that hard disk
to your another PC as slave drive.
That should be allow you to access the notes on it.

This is where Linux comes in; download any very low resource sucking LiveCD and boot it from there. Then move everything onto a backup.

Your hardware is getting too old, if it's me, it's in my "antique" collection.

xboxrulz

It sounds like your master boot record might be gone. First read the Microsoft article about Fdisk /MBR http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/ , and then boot with a DOS startup disk which includes Fdisk and use Fdisk /MBR to recreate the master boot record.

If the computer boots past the initial bios screen, then the MBR is fine.

Except for "The first time", it doesn't sound to me like he has gotten past BIOS. As soon as BIOS is finished loading, and the machine looks for a drive to read the MBR from, he gets a message that there's no drive.

While I agree with most posts in this thread, if you said your computer was expendable, I'm assuming you have another.

as jedipi said:


When you do this, just ensure that you have the jumper on the back of the drive set properly (most will have printed on them master, slave, cable select) - and attach it accordingly in your "non-expendable" computer.

On your standard motherboard you'll probably have two IDE channels - and most systems may have a few open. Each channel should have a master / slave attachment for the back of the drive. If you set master, you should use the "end" of the cable. If you choose slave, you should attach it to the "middle" of the cable.

Make sure you attach power from your power supply and boot up.

If you don't know what you're doing I'm sure you can google directions to install a hard drive. It's almost as easy as a PCI card.

The reason I'm telling you to do this instead of the alternate OS bootup method is that it would allow you to both put your data on the newer computer (which more likely contains better software/hardware for data tranfer anyways, i.e. a cd burner or something) - and the fact that Windows 98 uses FAT32 which poses no problems when accessing from other computers.

Once you've transferred your data to the new computer - you should probably wipe the old hard drive and reinstall the system on your old p2.

Don't forget to set your jumper properly when returning your HDD to the original computer.

P.S. - If your important data is corrupt as other parts of your drive may be, then you may have other problems and another question.


good luck - and watch out for static.

For old HDs it happens that they get to loose the magnetic properties of the disk surfaces. Then they need to be remagnetized. There's a program named "hdd regenerator" that does such task pretty good, it saved some of my HDs. In fact, some of my hard disks that i thought they became trash, they got faultless once passed by the hdd regenerator.