🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 15 Apr 1999 23:38:44 +0100, John Ferris
<jferris@lamlash.demon.co.uk> wrote:

>One of the brighter pupils at school managed to
>crash a 600Mb IDE drive on one of our Win 3.x PCs.
>
>On boot up it says operating system is missing.
>
>After booting from a floppy I can change to the C: drive
>but when I try to access it, I get invalid media.
>
>I know the solution is to reformat and reload DOS.
>
>Sadly we have no backups :(
>
>The question is can I recover somehow without reformatting?
> I tried from boot disk  sys c:   I tried fdisk/mbr
>
>Anything else worth trying before I give them
>bad news.  (Cheap data recovery program)

   You may want to check that the BIOS correctly describes the drive.
If this is set incorrectly then your 'sys c:' may have damaged part of
the drive anyway.
    The next thing is to take it to someone who is expert in these
things - they might be able to recover the unit.

   Otherwise you may have to join the long list of people who realise
that backups are *important*.

   I have to say here that *any* PC in a school should be regarded as
'crash and burn'.  You should make *no* assumptions about what was on
it last week - let alone long enough ago that Win3.x was current!

    Regards,
            Harry.