[thechat] Win FAT Repair Utility?

Judah McAuley judah at wiredotter.com
Fri Jan 21 15:36:50 CST 2005


Two quick things come to mind:

fdisk /mbr  ... that writes a new master boot record and can fix file 
allocation problems. It is non-destructive (unless you have a boot 
sector virus).

Look for an old copy of Norton Disk Doctor. The only bit of Norton 
Utilities that was ever worthwhile. But you can do all sorts of 
low-level futzing with it and it offers the ability to recover files by 
sector manually even if the FAT is hosed.

Judah

Luther, Ron wrote:
> chris hardy asked:
> 
> 
>>>Did you fdisk it before reinstalling windows? 
> 
> 
> 
> Hi Chris,
> 
> I think my wife is planning to fdisk the laptop before I get home this 
> evening. I think we're both pretty convinced that should be our next step.
> 
> [My gut feeling is that we'll end up 'low leveling' the drive, crossing 
> our fingers that this repairs the FAT, (I think it should), followed by 
> a full reinstall. Total loss of data - but oh well.]
> 
> 
>>>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. 
> 
> 
> Good memory! ... Yup - scandisk is there. Unfortunately it just 'reports' 
> FAT problems ... unless there is some "/fix_it_TOO" argument you can add 
> to the command that I don't know about, I don't think it provides any help 
> in actually repairing the FAT.
> 
> 
> RonL.


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