This is a small harddisk, I was using it to run win 98 from it. I deleted by mistake a file on my primary partition and tried to recover it with a dos-based norton unerase. I found the files and one of them was in a average recovery state (Norton unerase has 3 such states for files to be recoverd: good, average and poor)
When trying to recover the files, the program exited and upon restart i got the "boot disk failure" message.
At this point I stoped my computer and with a boot disk I tried to verify the directory structure of the harddsk (dir command from dos) but it was all messed up. I would guess the problem is with the mbr, but maybe you can help me better in what to do next in order to get my data back.
Thanks!

Operating system / Service Pack: win98se

Size of subject harddisk: 2,4GB, western digital caviar

i've emailed the partinfo log and the diskpatch log.
Hope they make more sense to you than to me! :)

Operating system / Service Pack: win98se

Size of subject harddisk: 2,4GB, western digital caviar

Hello,

Q: Was the disk always partitioned like this?

Side note: I do not recognize the boot code in the MBR. Are you using a boot manager or some drive overlay software (like Ontrack DDO or EZ drive)?

The primary FAT32 partition (the active one) looks okay partition table and boot sector wise. However it doesn't point to a valid root directory (although the cluster it points to, cluster 2, appears correct). Either the root start cluster in the boot sector is wrong, or, it is correct while the root directory itself is corrupt.

Apart from this current FAT32 partition, we could restore another FAT32 partition which seems valid enough. This partition would fit the picture perfectly as it neatly follows the Compaq partition while the current FAT32 partition leaves a gap.

Although the non existing partition does fit the Compaq partition better, it would leave a small gap before the extended starts (you do have access to the logical FAT partition, right?).

Doesn't Norton Unerase have an undo? Thought it did ... Or did it crash?

Well, anyway. The recovery of the partition while ditching the current FAT32 partition may be the solution. However you can only tell once you try. So, there are no guarantees I can give you.

You can also try to see if you can recover individual files and folders with something like iRecover. Also with iRecover it's pretty important to get the start of the volume right (especially with FAT/FAT32). But you could simply try the existing and the non existing partition (we can give the values for the latter based on the DiskPatch logfile).

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Kind regards,
Joep