🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <66qahq$20u$1@news1.sirius.com>, "Bill R. Adams"
<minister@sirius.com> writes
>
>
>"Matt Linden" <mattlinden@usa.net> wrote:
>>Bill R. Adams wrote in message <66poq7$kn$1@news1.sirius.com>...
>> I can only access the C: prompt with the reboot
>>>disk.
>>>However it is dead.  This message displays when I search for DIR:
>>>"Volume in Drive C has no Label. Volume Serial Number is 3465-13EA".
>>>When I attempt to access windows (typing Win at the C prompt), I get
>>>this message: "bad command or file name". Sorry for the confusion. - b
>
>
>>You won't be able to get into Windows from a boot disk even if the files are
>>there because the Windows directory isn't in the path.  When you do a DIR
>>C:\ are there any files or directories listed?  
>
>No. When I attempt to access C Drive directories, I get nothing but
>the Volume or bad command messages mentioned above. 
>
My middle son deleted his DoubleSpaced volume, in the mistaken belief
that it would free some disc space. (Well, it did, it did, but not in
the way that he imagined).

So, an agonised phone call, but not, alas, before he had made some
futile rescue attempts which worsened the situation. 

Latest backup!? Did I think he had *ever* copied 400mB to floppies!?

My advice was to boot from A: and use MS-DOS Undelete. 

Logical, since to DOS the I: drive *is* the hard drive, and the Dspaced
volume is just a giant MS-DOS file. It's the C: drive that is 'faked up'
by Dspace. Including, as you will have discovered by now, shadowing the
real system files from I: on C:. There's only really one instantiation
of each system file.

If he had called me immediately he'd bolloxed the machine, I think it
would have got the lot back perfectly, but his earlier rescue attempts
had compromised things a bit.

Undelete saw the Compressed Volume, and offered to undelete it, and
indeed did so. We had to tell it what the first letter of the file
name(s) used to be, but otherwise it wans't hard.

However, the machine still wasn't really straight. Scandisk (in read-
only mode!) reported that there were all sorts of cross-linked files,
and other file system anomalies. And we decided that letting Scandisk
rewrite it would only make things worse.

But by the nature of modern-day PCs, the 400mB was mostly installed apps
and games; the truly irreplaceable was a relatively modest selection of
.doc and .wri files. Modest in size, but still several term's-worth of
teaching notes....

Also, there were a few .inis that would save a lot of reconfiguration,
and we could get a directory list, which at least helped him remember
what was supposed to be on there.

So we knife-and-forked what we could to floppies, and did a complete
reinstall.


I reckon you are about where he was, and I reckon that the same sort of
rescue might work for you. Nobody here has yet mentioned Undelete; I
wonder why not?

For the future, I recommend you take up the machine's offer to hide the
I: drive away......
-- 
Roy Brown               Phone : (01684) 291710     Fax : (01684) 291712
Affirm Ltd              Email : roybrown@affirm.co.uk
The Great Barn, Mill St 'Have nothing on your systems that you do not    
TEWKESBURY GL20 5SB (UK) know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.'