Problem with partitioned hard drive

[UK31337]

Hope you can help,

On my old PC, I used Partition Magic in Windows 98SE to partition the drive for Linux. Something went wrong or I made a mistake, so now my whole drive is non-DOS according to FDisk, I can't boot Windows, and it says Error reading C: Abort Retry Fail, presumably because the drive is no longer FAT32. There seems no way of changing it back without losing everything.

I had Linux installed until a few days ago when I was servicing another person's drive in my machine, and looked at the wrong one in PM and deleted my own Linux. It was when setting up the drive for Linux again that this happened.

Questions: Is my originally stored data still intact, but only accessible if I install Linux? (It's FC3 I've got on CD). Is my existing data saved under Windows onto the FAT32 drive all gone? Is it possible to convert Linux partitions back into FAT32 without data loss?

There was a lot of stuff on the drive, but I don't think any of it was overly useful as it was an old(ish) machine, but the thought of losing it troubles me greatly.

Please help me if you can.

 

[longlivelinky]

Hmmm...I presume the information is indeed still intact

Take the hard drive out and get a IDE-USB caddy and use a USB wire to connect the HDD to another computer which has already booted on windows or linux depending on what info you wish to extract, it should hopefully read it as a removable disk drive and just read the files no matter what system its on.

Hope this helps.
alternatively you could connect the hard drive to another computer put it as the slave drive so it doesnt have to boot up and extract the files that way (I dont know if this will work as well as the one above)

 

[longlivelinky]

also i dont think changing a hard drive to FAT32 should make booting problems...all i know about FAT32 is its an older system whereby the clusters are larger and it works slower to NTSC...
or NSTC
whatever one it is lol

 

[~mr mixx~]

when it comes to having windows xp on a partition , it is most stable on a NTFS formatt.

But as far as having linux on a partition, i would say either formatt will do i suppose, windows needs a more stable format like NTFS, unless you have windows 98 wich uses FAT32 formatt.