>I really appreciate your time & effort in giving me replies..
>
>ur tips are very valuable....
>
>The whole story goes like this:-
>
>Initially i was using p75 (some 3-4 years back) with win 3.11, changed to p-133 with win95, then p-350 win95 & additional hard disk... few of the applications were installed in 3.11 and gives problem on 95...
>
>mistakes which I did before :-
>
>1. didn't used fdisk32 initially (bcos of which 4.3 gb hard disk was divided in two drives cos in dos partition maximum I cud get was 2.1
>2. before & now not having any device to take backup !!! (tape drive etc.)
>3. didn’t went for a fresh install instead loaded upgrade version on top of win 3.1
>
>And as I’m writing this, the latest news is that there r bad sectors in fat & system areas bcos of which 95 is not working.. somehow I copied my necessary files in other hard disk and tried to load 95 / repair fat, but nothing is working…
>

I'm afraid you've cooked yourself. Your best bet is to try taking the drives, mounting them in a working OSR2 or Win98 system that has a single drive installed, set up as a single partition so that drive letters don't get messed up, and back up whatever you can. Then throw away the 1GB drive that's dead; it isn't worth salvaging (once the drive has gone bad once, even if you succeed in reformatting it, it'll probably die again).

The key is to make a backup here. You're going to have to take the system apart at some point; it's dead now, and your best chance of recovering something is the procedure above. If this hasn't convinced you that you must make backups regularly, it's a lost cause. A Travan drive like the Iomega Ditto Max costs less than US$200 locally. How much money have you lost in downtime if you actually can recover everything you need to recover, and then can reinstall the operating system and applications you need? Then add to that the cost of anything you can't recover.

If you're absolutely desperate to recover stuff from your failed drive(s), you may want to contact a reputable data recovery operation (OnTrack, for example.) It'll cost anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars to recover your data, depending largely on what exactly is wrong with the drives. If there's physical damage to the drive surface, or extensive irrecoverable soft damage to the FAT and directory structure, they won't be able to recover everything. You can contact them at http://www.ontrack.com