d8b Forum

I have tried today to image my drive so that I can install a 4gb cf card. Cutting a long story short a faulty USB port on a PC has damaged the MBR/partition on the HDD. I've moved the HDD over to another PC. When I connect it via USB windows comes up with the dreaded "drive needs to be formated" message. Naturally windows sees the drive as "raw" now. I've used a few partition tools to view the contents of the drive and the is is still intact. I have a backup of the files and I have all my activation codes including the 5.1 OS etc which I had documented from the outset. Before I head down the road of reinstalling the os I thought I'd explore repairing the drive and asking before I start messing with it too much. I do have the 5.1 floppy's but I've never ventured onto their contents and have no idea if the floppy's work or their integrity nor do I have a floppy on my PC these days. I can't say I've used the floppy drive on the d8b either so to avoid potentially creating whole new set of problems and obstacles I thought I'd ask here first and explore the possibility of repairing the drive MBR/partition, ideally I could repair the HDD and image it then image back to the cf card as originally intended. Its been many years since I messed in dos or had to repair a partition let alone a d8b HD which is a first. Any advice would be appreciated.

Well I'll answer my own question, I finally bit the bullet and reinstalled the OS, I reinstalled it on a different HDD, I came to the conclusion that the original hard drive was in fact displaying some kind of fault which seemed to be present when starting the drive from cold in which it would connect and disconnect without warning. The other drive was fine connected to the same PC with the same ide hense ruling out the connection adapter etc. So I've installed it on the replacement drive having battled to get a working set of floppy's, I knew that wasn't gonna be simple. Once I got the disks and install sorted I went ahead and installed the os and fx directly on the CF card without hitch. Anyway the D8B is alive and kicking again.

Well done Klinux! Worth checking the integrity of my floppies after reading this, so thanks.
Great to hear that the desk is back up and kicking. Mine - 16 years since purchased new, one service this year for rail caps and still going strong.
Live long and prosper....
Guy