If I understand correctly only the ROOT of your drive is screwed up. If that is the case, I'd definately NOT advise to reinitialize that single partition (which can be done using the appropriate FDISK for your interface, btw). Because, when you do that, you'll lose *all* the data stored on that drive, while some might still be recoverable. Reinitializing is somewhat of a last resort, only to be done after having done all attempts to backup the original data. Ofcourse, if you don't care about the data on it, reinitializing is the best solution, and I'd personally also advise you to reinitialize it even if you recovered most of the files (so copy all recovered data to another partition, reinit it, and copy it back).
But exactly these kind of problems is is why I and a lot of others usually don't use the A: drive for important data, IF something goes wrong with a harddisk (and believe me, on MSX that has actually happened quite a lot to me), it usually only messes up the first partition. For example, it happened to me once that the contents of MSXDOS2.SYS got written over the first sectors of my HD. Possible causes: some program could have bugged out really bad, or some instability in one of my components could have caused it, the cartridge slot might not be entirely clean anymore and that accidental nudge I might have given to my interface might just have corrupted that one vital bit... There are several possibilities. If only the root directory structure is messed up but the FAT is intact, there is often still a good chance for recovery, however you've got to read in to some information about the structure of the directory entries. After that, if you more or less know what you are doing, the easiest way to recover your directories is indeed, using DISKVIEW. Create 1 new root directory in DOS, then start DISKVIEW, and scan all sectors until you find a subdirectory entry (recognizable by the . .. FILENAME FILENAME contents of the sector). Then point the newly created root directory entry to the found sector number (usually divided by a certain number depending on your cluster size), and repeat this. This might mess up the first directory that had been on the partition, but if you do it step by step and directory by directory, the others should be recoverable. If you know how to manually add a directory entry to the root directory (you can for example see with DISKVIEW how directory entries look on other drives), that is even better, because then the creation of the directory won't overwrite the first free cluster on the HD for sure. If there are problems with the boot sector, I think you can fix that by using FIXDISK (take a look at the command line options) on the A: drive. And if you're done, don't forget to at least run CHKDSK, and as I said it's probably best to reinitialize the partition after you've backed it up. ~Grauw ----- Original Message ----- From: "Diederick de Vries" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, November 16, 2002 12:57 PM Subject: [MSX] root screwed up Hi people, Remember me? I'm the one who's asking some questions about a couple of things lately. Hope you're not already fed up with me, because I'm in (a little) trouble: the root directory of my 0th partition (FAT12) of my Sunrise IDE harddrive is all screwed up. DIR as well as MM show lots of garbage, and all I did was a little BASIC programming, nothing out of the ordinary. The COMMAND2.COM and MSXDOS2.SYS were gone, as well as a couple of other files (including my BASIC program) but the directories seem unaffected. The harddrive should be fine: it's about two years old, and SCANDISK.COM revealed no errors. chkdsik /f doesn't help. Is there some program which can clean up my FAT, or perhaps the partition? Backing up, reformatting and then refilling the entire drive would cost me weeks. And another question, is BASIC dangerous? I did call my program AUTOEXEC.BAS. Greetings, Diederick from Groningen, Netherlands _______________________________________________ MSX mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Info page: http://lists.stack.nl/mailman/listinfo/msx _______________________________________________ MSX mailing list ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Info page: http://lists.stack.nl/mailman/listinfo/msx
