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Is it possible to retrieve data from a NTFS drive if WIN NT system crashes? I have an assembled Pentium IV, with a dual boot — WIN NT 4.0 workstation and Win 98SE — installed on C Drive, the size of HDD being 40 GB.

Once while powering on and booting from NT, I got an error message of Operating System loader having become corrupted, prompting me to insert boot disk and repair system files in the winnt\system32\config\. My WIN NT boot floppies had become unreadable and all repair attempts were in vain.

Fortunately, Win 98 is working all right and I managed to back up some data from its D and E partitions.

Through Win 98, I tried overwriting the files in the winnt\system32\, by expanding the necessary files from winnt\repair directory. But this did not have any effect. I tried reinstalling Win NT, after booting from Win 98, but the problem persisted. While booting from Win NT, I get a blue screen with an error message, "0x7....... Inaccessible_boot_device" showing some memory dumps. My hard disk does not have bad sectors. RAM is all right, tested with a standby. Most of my data are stored in the two NTFS volume on the HDD, each about 17 GB. I am unable to access these partitions. With fdisk utility, these partitions are not displayed. Please suggest how I can retrieve data from the NTFS drives and if I format the C drive and reinstall NT, whether I will be able to restore the NTFS drives in question. If so, kindly spell out the procedure. - Biren

It is possible to view NTFS partitions in Window 95/98 or DOS, you will need to use some third party utilities like the NTFSdos.exe which you can get from http://www.sysinternals.com/files/ntfs30r.zip This is a useful utility which mounts the NTFS volume in Read-Only mode for data recovery. All you have to do is boot into Win 98 or DOS and in the command prompt run the ntfsdos.exe. This will scan for any existing NTFS partitions and will mount it for read-only access. Once this is done, you can see these partitions through your `My Computer' or command prompt and access the data. And regarding reinstalling Window NT, you will be able to access the NTFS partitions normally if you install a new copy of Windows NT.

Solution by G. Rajah

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