A friend’s computer has a corrupted FAT. I know WIN98 keeps a second copy of the FAT somewhere and my only and last hope is the be able to restore FAT#1 from FAT#2. I have never done this. How is it done? Is there a DOS command? I can’t imagine. I have never seen it.
In DOS: FDISK /MBR.
No, wait, that’s not it. :smack:
I thought windows would automatically use copy #2 if copy #1 was corrupt?
Running scandisk off a boot floppy will usually generate the “recover 2nd FAT” prompt, but this can sometimes take forever under DOS with a multi-gig drive.
In these cases the best thing to do is generally to slave the drive to a known good system (assuming viruses are not involved) and scandisk will try to recover the FAT copy. A computer with Nortons Utilities Diskdoctor installed will also do this and usually offers a few more advanced recovery options.
Just as a “heads up”, in many of these corrupted FAT scenarios recovering the 2nd FAT gets you nothing but trash half (or more) of the time, as the first FAT damage is often caused by media shock or other surface damage that affects the other FAT copy as well.
It can automatically prompt to recover the FAT on bootup , but only if the OS is not too damaged to prompt for and run the FAT recovery option. At least half the time the OS is too far gone in these cases to generate the prompt much less run it.
I think I am going to stay away from trying to help in this case because there’s probably not much I can do and maybe even more damage. Chances are the second FAT is not going to help and I am just going to waste a lot of time on this. I have never had to deal with this before. He tells me it was scandisk which did all the damage in the first place.