[COMPUTER] Windows 2000 NTFS drive suddenly converted to HPFS?

Factual Questions
1

I’m at a loss here, folks.

This morning, when I booted up my Windows 2000 box, I got the dreaded BSOD - “blue screen of death.” W2Kstarted to boot, but before the “picture screen,” the BSOD appeared. Apparently, my hard drive was no longer recognized as a bootable device. I tried reinstalling W2K – it still wouldn’t let me in. Rescue disks … nothing.

I’m at home now, with the drive hooked up to my W2K box here. At first, same thing – even when the jumpers were in place (I made it a slave to my boot drive) and I everything was properly connected … BSOD. I tried hooking it up to an IDE controller card – success, or so I thought. W2K took forever to boot, and it didn’t recognize the drive. I tried running Norton Utilities – nothing. I then tried Partision Manager to see waht was up, and it revealed that the drive was now an HPFS drive … somehow, the boot sector identifies that disk as being formatted for OS/2!

I just want to be able to get at my documents on the disk, and then I can wipe it clean and reinstall everything. Does anyone know what’s going on, or how I can fix this? Is there a utility that will just mark the boot sector of that drive as an NTFS disk?

2

Never mind. I managed to fix the boot sector. The disk still won’t boot, but I’ve managed to save all the important data.

3

I suspect that Partition Magic is just confusing NTFS with HPFS… the filesystems are kind of similar, and Linux also makes the same mistake.

4

No, Partition Magic should not confuse NTFS and HPFS. More likely, the boot sector of the disk was corrupted and the flag for filesystem was erroneously set.

Linux confuses them because they are equally inaccessible. Partition Magic can work with HPFS partitions and should be able to tell them from NTFS.