Advice needed. Really techie!

MyUserNamesTaken

For some reason, when I rebooted the other day, it blue screened upon reboot. Tried rebooting in safe mode, but it still blue screened on me. Right now, I'm running Spinrite 6 on it. It's got 16198 hours left, as there are so many corrupt sectors on the drive. It's been running for three days and it's only on cylinder 7 I have tried doing a windows repair, but it wouldn't do chkdsk/f. It wouldn't even run chkdsk for me. It's only a 40GB HDD! When I last ran NOD32, the day the PC died on me, it reported major boot record errors. It's a Dell 4600+ Dimension, by the way. I'm running XP with SP2, all updated and what-not. NTFS, not FAT.

My question is this: would it be possible to install windows XP on an external drive, then boot the pc off that to try and access whatever data I can on C drive? I only need to access My Documents, really. The rest is rubbish. Data-wise, the drive has about 18GBs of data on it, including the OS and various programs I don't need to save. If I can boot off an external drive to access C drive, I can grab what I need from My Docs and then reformat and do a fresh XP install.

greyster

quite a tough one and I couldn't give you a definite answer.

have you tried

http://www.experts-exchange.com/

?

I'm a techie myself but when something beats me I go there and get answers relatively quick. Its based on a points system so its in the interest of the "experts" to answer your question. Experts compete for recognition, potential jobs and prizes. Biggest technical forum of its kind.

Hope it helps.

indiegirl_2

As long as your PC can boot from USB, I don't think that's a problem in the slightest.

(or you could remove the drive from your machine, ask a friend v nicely to plug it into theirs and recover what you need that way)...

I wonder if it would be worth just rendering that 40gb drive as a second one, and picking yourself an 80 or 160gb up and installing on there from scratch. I'm not sure I'd trust a drive having had that many errors on it as my primary drive again...

MyUserNamesTaken

Thanks for that, greyster. That site charges before you can do anything, though. As far as I know, Spinrite will sort the problems. However, it's going to take months for it to work through the drive. If I can install and boot from an external drive, this should sort things for me. I've got two external drives I could use for this purpose.

Chippy_Minton

MyUserNamesTaken wrote:

My question is this: would it be possible to install windows XP on an external drive, then boot the pc off that to try and access whatever data I can on C drive? I only need to access My Documents, really. The rest is rubbish. Data-wise, the drive has about 18GBs of data on it, including the OS and various programs I don't need to save. If I can boot off an external drive to access C drive, I can grab what I need from My Docs and then reformat and do a fresh XP install.

Download or buy Knoppix or one of the other 'live' Linux distros. This allows you to boot your PC from the CD into Linux and then use some of the tools on the CD to recover your data. Knoppix can read Windows partitions, so if the drive surface isn't damaged there's a good chance that it can see your data.

MyUserNamesTaken

indiegirl wrote:

As long as your PC can boot from USB, I don't think that's a problem in the slightest.

(or you could remove the drive from your machine, ask a friend v nicely to plug it into theirs and recover what you need that way)...

I wonder if it would be worth just rendering that 40gb drive as a second one, and picking yourself an 80 or 160gb up and installing on there from scratch. I'm not sure I'd trust a drive having had that many errors on it as my primary drive again...

The 40GB drive came with the machine. I've also got a 120GB HDD in there, but the OS isn't on there. That drive is ok, however, there's stuff on there I don't want to lose, so don't want to install XP on there or risk trying to partition it now. I've got a 160GB external drive already connected to the computer, but need to get some stuff off it before trying to install the OS on it. When I go into boot options, I can see the external drive. Theoretically, it should be possible. Alternatively, I've got a 250GB external drive connected to this laptop that I could use to stick the OS on, as there's not much on it I need to save.

MyUserNamesTaken

OK, got everything off the external drive. Now to see if I can install XP on it.

matty_c608

It's actually rather hard to boot up from an external USB drive...

MyUserNamesTaken

It won't let me install XP on it, anyway. Strangely enough, the C drive is showing up as having an unrecognisable file system at the mo. Spinrite's back on and doing what it's supposed to do until Knoppix has finished downloading, then I'll give that a go.

scheming_gypsy

try disconnecting the internal drive and just having the external as the main drive.

wolfman

Chippy_Minton wrote:

Download or buy Knoppix or one of the other 'live' Linux distros. This allows you to boot your PC from the CD into Linux and then use some of the tools on the CD to recover your data. Knoppix can read Windows partitions, so if the drive surface isn't damaged there's a good chance that it can see your data.

You may have problems if you have an NTFS file system. Linux generally doesn't support it by default (not sure if this applies to Knoppix), although there are projects out there that can add such support so that Linux can see and read (not write though, unstable) an NTFS partition.

Still, well worth having a copy of Knoppix, very handy.