Almighty Geek Gods, please help

A little flattery goes a long way.

So I had an issue. Then I made an issue. With the info in these forums I got rid of my first issue (Thank You!), which was a combo of Web Rebates, Delf trojan something-or-other, CoolWeb and a few others I forget. Somewhere in there though I seemed to have lost track of my D:\ drive, which is the second issue. So, the story thus far:

To clean up all the nasties off C: I followed directions and d/l'd and ran CCleaner, Ad-Aware SE, the VX2 Cleaner Plug-In to go with it, Spybot, AVERT Stinger, and CWShredder. CCleaner gave me the first indication that something was wrong when it asked me if I wanted to format D: (I ran CCleaner after Avert and the online Symantec scanner utility). This was odd since D: was my backup drive and I hadn't done anything with it in a couple months but I said No and ignored it. Then later on I remembered and tried to scoot over to D: in Explorer and it gave me the following error:

"D:\ is not accessible.
A device attached to the system is not functioning"

Has anyone else had this problem? More importantly, has anyone else had and fixed it? System-wise, I'm running Win98 SE on an Intel P3 733. I'd love to be more specific, but my knowledge stops about there.

 

Sounds like something has hooched your MBR or your primary bootsector on the D: drive.

Try to run a "CHKDSK /f d:" from a command prompt...this likely will not work though.... but I have seen it re-initialze a disk before.

 

Thanks for the reply. When I do that it just says "general failure reading drive D:".

Totally hooched beyond saveability you think?

 

also try *also in dos mode* fdisk d:\ /mbr

should rebuild the master boot record on that drive,

also would be useful if you try the hdd in another computer, just to see if it's not your ide channel or windows installation that is fubar...

 

fdisk d:\ /mbr
"Parameter format not correct - d:\"

Unfortunately no spare computer at hand, but I'll see if I can commandeer one.

 

sorry for that bad command ( old dos days )

from the D drive, if accessible fdisk /mbr

or fdisk d: /mbr but i dunno if this one works

 

Quite alright.

I can't get to D:, it tells me the drive is no longer valid right after giving me that "general failure reading drive d" msg.

The second option gives me incorrect parameter.

 

From the Q article. You can't specify a drive letter.




http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q69013/

</snip>

NOTE: The fdisk /mbr command only re-writes the MBR on the system drive (DISK-0) using BIOS calls. You cannot specify any other drive for the fdisk /mbr command to operate on other than DISK-0.

 

I can tell you if the drive is readable if this utiliy will run on Win98...doesn't say it supports it but give it a try.

Download sector inspector and post the results here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/...2a-a586-4079-9489-c3ea14573fc4&DisplayLang=en



It will install it to C:\Program Files\Windows Resource Kits\Tools > go to a command propmt and run it. Pipe it to a text file and paste the contents here.

type :secinspect.exe >sectors.txt

 

Again, from the run command, use FDISK /CMBR <drive number> where <drive number> represents the drive you wish to recreate the master boot record. To determine the drive number, run the fdisk /status command.

Hope this helps!

Cherie