Need help saving my secondary system from a reformat

[Tithulta]

Ok well it all started last night after I went to bed. Power went out(no apc backups...really want one now though). Not much in the way of backup copies of personal data so I'd rather not reformat to fix my problem.
Well the power outage messed up my seconday system. I managed to get it running again before leaving for work it needed defraged pretty badly so I set it up a working and when i left is was nearly finished defragin. Mom called me not 5 minutes after I had left to tell me the power had went out and she didn't know what to do aboutt he computers. I sighed heavily and told her to just cut thier monitors off and dad would try and restart them when he got home. he called me at work and my main system booted up with not errors. His however(the one defragin) is all but dead now. When it gets to the windows splash it just shutsdown. When it's booting up it says that the boot up info is missing from IDE-0. How can I fix it other than reinstall? I have a recent startup disk made just a few days ago. Also is it possible to access a harddisk that isn't logged into the network? If i can I can just copy & paste the info needed to be saved and reformat. I'll be here as I want to get the system back up Folding ASAP. My system sat here with 96 of 100 frames finished for 8 hour where my dad didn't restart the client. Guess I need to go ahead and make it startup with windows from now on.

 

[Jon]

Boot to DOS with your startup disk. Input the following commands exactly and ENTER after each line:

c:
cd\windows\command

attrib c:\msdos.sys -s -h -r

copy c:\msdos.sys c:\msdos.xxx

a:

sys c:

attrib c:\msdos.sys -s -h -r

del c:\msdos.sys

copy c:\msdos.xxx c:\msdos.sys

attrib c:\msdos.sys +s +h +r

Then reboot without the startup disk.

This will rewrite the MBR on your hard drive. Since it looks as your MBR was partially destroyed by the power outages this should be able to boot you back into Windows.

This will work with Win98 or Win95.

 

[Tithulta]

Cool thanks...let ya know how it goes in a few

 

[Tithulta]

same deal as before... it starts loading windows then just abruptly shutsdown. I really hate to reformat as my dad will lose about 2 months worth of ancestory research..sort of...he has hard copies of everything, but it's translates to ALOT of typing to reenter the info to the copy of his stuff still on my system from Sept.

 

[Goldwing]

There is also the possiblity that the PS was damaged by the voltage interrupts/surges and is incapable of maintaining sufficient power and auto shuts down. You might try the other systems PS.

Another possibliity is to put the HD from the second machine in as a non-booting HD in your primary machine and attempt critical data recovery before reformatting.

 

[Tithulta]

how do i make it a non-booting drive? just turn off it's abillity to boot in the bios?

 

[TJ9]

Try running checkdisk and scan disk from dos and do a surface scan.
Just type chckdsk and scandisk to run them I think.
You might need to make a start up disk to do this. In 98 you need to go into the add/remove programs menu then pick the startup tab. All you need is a floppy and the win disk.
Another possiblility is to reinstall windows without reformating. Just start the install as normal and install to the same windows directory.

 

[Tithulta]

tried chkdsk and scandsk no help

Going to try reinstalling windows after work

 

[Tithulta]

Ok I ahven't tried the reinstall of windows ...yet..but one thing i noticed that I didn't before is when it's loading windows at the splash screen and then abruptly shutsdown ...VERY BRIEFLY it flashes error loading keyboard.drv....how can i fix it?

 

[Tithulta]

I got it...it was a DUH! question....copied my working keyboard driver to his startup disk...deleted his and copied mine toit and all is "almost" well....think it's going to need a windows reinstall to completely straighten it out