A friend's pc crashed and they're in need of help - a while back a friend or relative of theirs installed a large HD and partioned it into multiple drives.  Well they're pc crashed late last week during a modem upgrade and it somehow got so bad that they had to reinstall their OS (W'95) and so now the partitions are not coming up.  So the ? is - How can they get the OS to recognize the partions?  (Based on the assumption they haven't been screwed up.)

TIA

When they go into fdisk is C: set as active.The primary DOS usually C: meeds to be active for the OS to recognize it.

First, try a boot disk with fdisk on it.  Go into fdisk and make sure the partitions still exist.  If not, they will need to be recreated, and you'll have to reinstall the OS.

There's a good possibility that before they reinstalled the OS the ran fdisk and the partitions are already destroyed.  Does the size of drive C indicate this might have happened?

I won't be talking to them until this evening so I can't answer any ?'s at this time.

DOS doesn't require that.  Some buggy BIOS'es do.  The BIOS is simply supposed to read the first physical sector from the floppy, then if it doesn't exist, the hard drive.  A few BIOS'es check the partition table on the hard drive to see if there is an active partition before continuing.  The BIOS should know nothing about the partition table.  It is simply supposed to read the first sector.  Then the boot loader reads the partition table.

If the partitions show-up under fdisk (but not as drives under DOS), then sometimes running "fdisk /mbr" will fix it.  That recreates the master boot record.  Simply running fdisk does not recreate this.  I don't think this will fix it, but it's worth a try.  It's also something nice to try to fix things after getting a virus (they sometimes infect the boot record) or installing a different boot manager.z

ALSO, if you have to reload the OS try to find them a copy of Windoze 98SE since it recognizes large partitions.  You will lose a little drive capacity but you won't have so many logical drives.  Much cleaner!

If they used some crappy partitioning software like OnTrack, you are hosed.  Some older machines don't properly recognize large drives without a utility.  I hope that is not the case here.