China DOS Union

The system is divided into 4 partitions, all in FAT32 format. When reinstalling the system (win2000), I formatted drive C with NTFS. After the system was installed, the other partitions could no longer be recognized. Double-clicking the drive letters just prompts that they need to be formatted. What is going on? All my data is on those other drives. thx!

I reinstalled twice. The first time, it couldn't even format, because it kept saying drive C was unformatted. After entering DOS, I also found that the original system files were still there. That's why I used NTFS to format c drive.

This problem is very strange. Was it formatted with windows2000? There shouldn't be any problem. I don't have any especially good suggestions; try using windows2000's formatting function again and convert drive c to fat32 to see.
Also, you can use diskman and see whether it can repair it.

Use DISKGEN to repair it, and whatever you do, don't format it. Once you format it, your data will really be in danger.

First, boot into DOS with the current boot disk and see whether they are there.
Second, use a partitioning tool to take a look.
Third, use DISKGEN to search for (rebuild) the partitions.

Many thanks, everyone. I've already used easyrecovery to back up all the data first, but it's too messy. I'm trying to see whether there is any other software that can directly restore the original partitions. Also: FAT32 formatting of the hard disk could not be completed, because when I first set up the machine, that was the format I used, but after formatting the machine would automatically reboot, and then installation could not continue. When I entered dos and looked at drive C, all the system files were still there. That's why I thought of using NTFS to format it.

Using easyrecovery to check it, the result says: Extended SMART Test for drive Maxtor 6E040L0 failed, physical drive problems have been found indicating your hard drive is physically unstable. The disk has developed a physical fault. Right now I want to get the data out first. I used easyrecovery to recover most of the word and excel documents, but there are several thousand of them, and they have no filenames, only numeric IDs. Could an expert recommend a few good software tools for rescuing disk data? As long as I can get out the word, excel, and pictures, that's enough; I can forget the rest. bow

The full name of DiskGen is Disk Genius; you can use it to rebuild the partition table. Files recovered with EasyRecovery are not necessarily usable. EasyRecovery is considered pretty good already; I've only heard of EnCase. If the hard disk has physical damage, you'd better replace it as soon as possible.

After downloading and extracting it, there is a DOS program. After double-clicking it, it directly says “hard disk not installed”. After clicking OK it exits.
Can you recommend a download link for a higher version? thx！
btw：easyrecovery really isn't very good to use

Run it in a pure DOS environment; 2.0 is the highest version.

Use GHOST's Partintion to Image to try making images of those partitions and save them to a good disk or an external hard drive, then use GHOST Explorer to extract the data you want.

After confirming that important data has been backed up, repartition and format the problem disk completely, and see whether it can still be used normally.

If that doesn't work, use GHSOT

I ran into this problem before too, but DiskGen hadn't come out yet back then, so.... all the data was gone, boohoo~~

Hope the OP's problem can be solved!