Invalid media Type

DonLogan wrote:

Running W98. Have two disks, c: & d:
D is a 200gig, one partition, data drive. Left a program copying data
to d: overnight. This morning it said disk full, make some space.
Explorer saw d: but wouldn't give me any directory structure.
Looked at d:, over the network, from another machine & same thing.
Rebooted & I'm getting "Error 1 loading OS. May be due to a virus."
Then 4 options. Turned off virus check in bios & same thing. (think
this is some old disk 137 thing left over - will check later)

The "invalid media type" error message indicates corruption of the BPB (BIOS
boot block, found in the extended BOOT SECTOR (usually sectors 63 to 68) and
usually not the partition table. Yet there is a possibility that an erratic
write to the MBR wrote to the partition table and the pointer to the boot sector
is pointing elsewhere, which results in the same "invalid media type" message.
I have seen both errors to occur on drive I fixed. A boot virus is also a
possibility, although remote (boot viruses do not exist anymore in the wild, and
the only possibility to catch one now is by attempting to boot of an infected
very old floppy).

So booted from CD & get "invalid media type reading drive d. abort
retry fail"
Guess I have partition corruption? Any free utility to clean this up?
thanks

Try RESQDISK (see my signature) to assess the problem.

Before fixing the wrong thing you need first to resolve which of the above is
the cause to the problem.

Regards, Zvi

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NetZ Computing Ltd. ISRAEL www.invircible.com www.ivi.co.il (Hebrew)
InVircible Virus Defense Solutions, ResQ and Data Recovery Utilities