Explorer crash and the boot partition death

[Robert Whittington]

I have (or had) a system that was running both Win 98 and NT 4.0. I
recently began to experience an increase in the number of crashes caused by
explorer.exe. Now, I believe as a result of these freeze-ups the FAT or
master boot record of my boot drive c: has been severley damaged. I tried
to fix it with Norton but to no avail. This seemed to make things worse and
unfortunately it does not let me use my UNDO files. Now the drive is
inaccessible and my system won't boot. Is there any way to fix this or do I
have to reformat c: and re-install the operating systems, thus losing any
existing data on C:. Any input would be greatly appreciated as I am really
stumped and need to access some of the data on my C: drive.

Thanks a million,

Rob Whittington

P.S. I was running System Commander and Partition Magic and I was wondering
if they could help in remedying this problem.

[James A. Eshelman]

Robert Whittington <ra...@columbia.edu> wrote in message
news:e4RQnz6m#GA....@cppssbbsa02.microsoft.com...

> I have (or had) a system that was running both Win 98 and NT 4.0. I
> recently began to experience an increase in the number of crashes caused
by
> explorer.exe. Now, I believe as a result of these freeze-ups the FAT or
> master boot record of my boot drive c: has been severley damaged. I tried
> to fix it with Norton but to no avail. This seemed to make things worse
and
> unfortunately it does not let me use my UNDO files. Now the drive is
> inaccessible and my system won't boot. Is there any way to fix this or do
I
> have to reformat c: and re-install the operating systems, thus losing any
> existing data on C:. Any input would be greatly appreciated as I am
really
> stumped and need to access some of the data on my C: drive.

Do you have a Win98 startup diskette? And when you boot from this diskette,
can you see/read the C: drive? Then this might help:

There is an undocumented feature in FDisk to restore the Master Book Record.
It is
FDISK /MBR
Before using it, read the following Knowledge Base article:
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q69/0/13.asp

Note that this command may cause some problems with some multiboot software.
However, I have used it safely -- more than safely! -- with System Commander
installed. (System Commander had trashed my system on install -- or the
partial install, which was all it would allow! -- and booting from A: then
restoring the MBR with FDISK fixed the problem by removing System
Commander's overlay MBR.)

--
JAE
Member, On Computers A-Team
news:msn.forums.oncomputers
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"It is well to remember that the entire universe, with one trifling
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