Recovering Data

I am unable to access the data on my second drive. I want to know how bad the problem is and my options for recovery. I’m running Windows 98SE. Windows can see the drive. When I try to access the data on the drive my system freezes. CHKDSK freezes the system. When I boot DOS 6.2 with a floppy I can change to the drive and any directory on the drive. If I do a DIR on any directory on the drive I will get a listing of the data but once the listing is complete the system freezes and I do not return to the command prompt. The data is 99.9% MP3 files.

I appreciate any insight.

Has the drive been changed in any way - from working in the case, to software manipulations? Can ypou create a Win98SE boot disk and run scandisk on that drive? (A DOS 6.2 disk cannott read fAT32 and so I would abandon hope of that as a solution.)

This is a second physical drive, not just another partition of the only drive in that machine?

Personally I would boot with a Linux live CD and just copy those files to the C drive for saving or across a network, or to a thumb drive....whatever you have available. You didn't give your drive specifics, so I will recommend this, but there are others. It writes NOTHING to your hard drive and runs directly from a bootable CD drive.

http://iso.linuxquestions.org/distro.php?distro=5

version 3.7 should work fine, but the others could be used too.

Afterr everything is backed up, a godd formatting and reinstallation of all drives might be a good idea, just on genereal principle.

You can also try Windows Data Recovery Tool, which recover data from Windows FAT12, FAT16, FAT32, NTFS & NTFS5 Partition