Thinkpads Forum

Hi all,
my TP600X (192Mb mem, Win98se) has begun having troubles a few days ago.
On a restart I didn't get my icons, the system hung after having played the intro .wav displaying a nice blue screen. Only 3 progs where loaded into memory, Explorer and sshmonitor progs.
I tried several options and finally ran PC-Doctor to check the system.
PC-Doctor found a faulty sector on harddisk so I ran Scandisk to try to repair this but Scandisk did not find any problem at all!
At this time I was still able to run the TP in secure mode.
To keep a long story short, my TP is now totally blocked unless booting on CD or floppy.
I have all the recovery tools but this means that all my files will be deleted. In fact, most of them are backed up but the recent ones are important to me so my question is, how could I save my files which are on logical unit D: ?
I figured I could reinstal Windows on C: without touching D: but it won't startup because there's allready a system installed.
To avoid this I thought of formatting C: with my system floppy but launching format c: /s gives me an error message because of a lack of memory .
Please feel free to give me any usefull idea!
Tnx in advance
Peter

Welcome to Thinkpads.com!

Just a guess from what you have told, it would seem that the hard drive has possibly gone bad. Now it may just have a bad sector and the only way I really know how to fix it is with a full format of the hard drive. Since Windows 98 is DOS in nature, you could put the drive into another computer, get your files and reinstall then put the drive back in the 600. I hate when hard drives decide to crazy

Hi, and thanks for your reply
Yes, it's behavior is a bit weird!
Anyway, I think you're right, better save my recent files first before moving into risky manipulations!
I ordered an adapter because that's one of those things you don't have in stock and i'll give it a try.
Results will come online afterwards.
If ever I recover my hard drive, I might consider upgrading to W2k because of NTFS don't you think so?

I have never tried it, but I so think NTFS partitions are easier to recover than FAT32. Personally, I use NTFS on drives bigger than 20GB. Anything less I use FAT32.

Ok, well it seemed I had a bas sector on logical drive D, which is not supposed to be the system partition but I had a small prog installed on D which was loaded into mem on startup. I guess this must have been the reason why I couldn't get into the system anymore?
Anyway, with an adapter I managed to recover my latest data and then I had to recover both partitions with the recover CD. Since, all's well. I just upgraded to NTFS afterwards.
Thanks for your help!

Peter