HARD DRIVE DELETING ITSELF!!!!

[-WM-llyama]

I have a Maxtor 8gb hard-drive

Now i have it in 2 partitions, Windows on a 6gb partition and 1 or 2 games on a 2gb partition.

Now my 2nd partition has deleted itself 3 times in the past month! It disappears out of windows, and in Fdisk the Extended DOS partition is still there but without the logical drive assigned to it. All i can do is re-assign the drive and then format it.

I haven't got a clue and the Maxtor website is about as much use as an inflatable dartboard.

I have scanned for virus' etc and haven't found anything.

This time it happened after i defragged my main partition, did that have something to do with it? But the other two times i didn't do anything out of the ordinary

[Calzor Suzay]

Have you run Scandisk? then maybe a surface scan (this'll take ages). It may that the area holding this information has become corrupt, if you run scandisk and it is then Win98 will identify the area and work around it but until you run scandisk it'll just carry on using it.

Have you run a virus checker using a clean bottable floppy? This may identify a virus sitting in the MBR Master Boot record that deletes the partition, does it happen on a particular day in the month or every 30 days etc...

[-WM-llyama]

hmz

don't know about the month thing but i will run scandisk, thanks