Bin or not to bin!

[theshoeshineman]

I recently found a hard drive with Windows 95 on it.

It wouldn't boot in any PC as it had too many corrupt files.

I tried to attach it as a slave but Vista couldn't read the drive at all as it wasn't NTSC formatted.

Luckally I had just installed Windows 2000 on a crappy PC and I put it as a slave on that and was able to retrieve a whole heap of historic documents from the drive.

In short... the pc might not be great but it'd be good for testing old crappy equipment without pulling apart your nicer stuff.

[XcOM]

vista can read fat drives, i know it can because my old system i installed vista on was 98 dual boot and it could read the 98 partition fine

[nevermind1534]

and memory cards are formatted as FAT.

[theshoeshineman]

Hmm well for some reason it wouldn't even look at this drive and said that it wasn't formatted. It might have been more to do with the corruption on it then?

Because when I looked at it with Windows 2000 it would see the drive straight away every time, every so often when I was browsing the directories it would lock up saying that it could not read various sectors but I was able to use it long enough to get all the files in the my documents folder out of it.

Maybe it's got something to do with how they read the FAT as it is corrupted and locks up every time a repair is attempted

[XcOM]

FAT = File alloation Table,

fat using a form of a table to find data, if it can't find the data that is supposed to be there according to the table it will lock up,

Fat uses 12k for a 0k file,
Fat 16 uses 8k for a 0k file
Fat 32 uses 4k but adds support for bad sectors and drives larger than 80gb (I once formatted a 500GB drive into FAT32, and it saw all of it, fdisk said it was 12gb, format /u c: said it was 56gb, dos said it was 56gb, but windows 98SE said it was 450ish +/- for FAT table)

Supposidy FAT 32 supports 2Tb drives using 2k clusters but you have to force this option doing an /U format setting the cluster size, wouldn't want to format a 2TB drive in dos, would take all day