[thechat] Win FAT Repair Utility?

[chris hardy]

Hi Ron,
Did you fdisk it before reinstalling windows? 

I seem to recall that the ME emergency disk has scandisk on it. If so, you
could boot from that disk and at the command prompt type scandisk - it'll
check the FAT and might even fix it. 

Let me know if you need an emergency disk - I might be able to dig one out
of the dark recesses of my backup files.

hth
-chris



> -----Original Message-----
> From: thechat-bounces at lists.evolt.org 
> [mailto:thechat-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of Luther, Ron
> Sent: Friday, January 21, 2005 6:24 AM
> To: Chat (E-mail)
> Subject: [thechat] Win FAT Repair Utility?
> 
> 
> Hi Gang,
> 
> 
> Like probably everybody else here, no matter how many times I explain 
> that "Just because I can drive a car well - doesn't mean I 
> can rebuild 
> a transmission." --- I end up attempting to 'fix' family hardware 
> problems. Oy!
> 
> My brother-in-law has a dead laptop ... I know this because it's 
> currently sitting at home on the coffee table in my living room.
> 
> It's one of those, (most excellent), "Windows Millenium" machines.
> 
> My wife managed to find a boot disk for it from someone and were able 
> to poke around on the hard drive for a bit. (My suggestion to boot 
> to a Knoppix disk so we could rummage around the hard drive 
> was looked 
> at askance. <shrug />)
> 
> Anyway, Windows refuses to reinstall because of an FAT error.
> 
> Ouch. That's not good.
> 
> A looooooooooong time ago, I used to know what that meant. (At that 
> time (for an 8-bit C6502 machine anyway) I had a set of utilities 
> (including a sector based hex editor - those things let you go in 
> and edit specific disk addresses instead of specific files - very 
> handy for this (and other) kind(s) of stuff) that would actually let 
> me go in and attempt to manually 'correct' problems like this.)
> 
> 
> So, my question then ... is there an 'easy to use' (because I've 
> pretty much forgotten anything I ever thought I used to know about 
> physical disk architectures) and 'above board' (because I'm older 
> and more 'socially responsible' these days -- I'm not interested 
> in learning a secret handshake and standing in the dumpster at 
> midnight in order to download a set of 'cracker' tools) utility 
> that will let me take a stab at repairing the FAT on this booger?
> 
> Oh! Cost is, of course, a factor. I'm not willing to spend $90 on 
> SpinRite v6 ... even if I were convinced that it would solve the 
> problem.
> 
> 
> I'm guessing my next step is probably a 'low level' formatting.
> 
> 
> TIA,
> 
> RonL.
> 
> 
> <anti-tip>
> Since this is perilously close to being 'OT' for thechat ... allow me 
> to recommend another fun, off-beat, "indy" flick:  The Station Agent.
> 
> It's not a 'big star' action 'blow em up'. It's a very very 
> understated 
> 'people interaction' film. Low key. It ambles more than paces. 
> 
> Now, if you're okay with that kind of movie ... then this really is 
> a pretty good choice.
> 
> IMDB is giving it 8.1 out of 10 stars on 5,700 votes at the moment. 
> I think that's probably a fair assessment.
> </ anti-tip>
> 
> 
> Good grief! You made it this far? Okay, question:
> 
> Does anyone recall the name of a British film, pre-1990 I think, 
> that dealt with the life of a man who kept up the pitch for the 
> local town team. (I thought it was called 'The GroundsKeeper' 
> or something droll like that.) I rather liked it. However, anyone 
> I tried to subject to it felt it was 'painfully' slow moving ... to 
> the point where watching paint dry would be a more exciting 
> alternative. 
> ___________________________________
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