I have spent the last four days trying to bail our neighbors out of a hard drive failure.
I had no trouble recovering their data; I just mounted the bad drive under a [tomsrtbt] linux rescue disk system and was able to copy all the files from the fat32 partition on the old drive onto a ext2 partition on a new drive. Linux had no problem stepping over the bad sectors on the damaged drive... only a couple of windows system files were not recoverable since they were sitting on the defect.
The hard part came when I tried to restore windows onto the new hard drive.
The computer came with a system cd and a boot floppy, both based on a version of windows 95 with all the drivers for the system hardware, and with a boot script for handling the recovery.
The boot script immediately reformatted the new 40 gig HD ''(which I had partitioned very nicely with a generous fat32 partition, a 5 gig fat32 data partition, and two small linux partitions, one of which had the recovered data)'' with a single 8 gig partition (destroying all the recovered data) and then the neighbor told me that the CD drive was broken too.
So I got them a new CD drive.
Now all the recovery work was undone. I blamed this on the shortsightedness of the boot disk designer, who seemed to feel that nobody would ever want more than one partition of exactly 8 gig.
So, I went to a great deal of trouble to get a windows 98se original full distribution and proceeded to recover the data again and install windows 98...
Oops! No driver for the winmodem... No driver for the video chip... No driver for the printer... what the hey? So, I go back home, download the drivers and burn a cd, and back to the neighbors...
Huh? Windows doesn't know what to do with a zip file and has got no utility installed to unzip the driver packages!!
Go back home and get winzip off the web, and back to the neighbors...
What? Dialup service cannot be configured no possible way because the driver for the modem was not installed at the time windows was installed. So there is no driver for dialup networking. Period.
At this point I walked away shaking my head, and told the poor folks to go find a windows expert, since installing it was plainly beyond me. -Phil
If you are still using windows after that there is no help for you.
dude, that is like my mother trying to use fdisk -- ya gots ta get with the program ;) before you can disrespect it ;) dude ;)
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