Advice needed. Really techie!

greyster

experts-exchange do not charge.

You can pay to have access to their archive of previous technical problems which is useful for businesses. Or you can pay for more points to allocate to your questions - to increase the chance your question will be answered. I can assure you it will be answered anyway.

Used it for years, i wonder perhaps because there is a lot going on it gives the impression you have to pay.

G.

boogiemaster

Normally you set the boot option from the bios and choose what hard drive to boot from.
I’ve never booted from a USB drive so I wouldn’t know, it should be possible to do it.

MyUserNamesTaken

The problem with that idea is that Windows XP won't install on the external drive. I'm going to try Knoppix, which should finish downloading in an hour. If that doesn't work, I'll whip out the dodgy drive and stick in another 40GB drive. Format and install XP on the new drive, then move all the stuff of my internal 120GB drive. Then I'll format that drive, partition it, the do a fresh XP install on that. Reformat the 40GB, wiping off the XP installation before removing it, then bung in the old dodgy drive and see what, if anything, I can see on it. I know it sounds like a lot of hard work, but it's better than waiting the months Spinrite is saying it's going to take. Alternatively, I could bung the dodgy drive into an external enclosure and see if I can get into it using my laptop.

Mr_Skint_2

I know this probably wont be much use but can you repair said drive with
booting into safe mode http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1643&page=1
or use a file recovery tool or UBCD to retrieve files, i.e burn to disc then bin HDD
and install new drive with fresh XP install.........


Or am I missing summet here? Oh well just a few options I suppose.

MyUserNamesTaken

Mr_Skint wrote:

I know this probably wont be much use but can you repair said drive with
booting into safe mode http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1643&page=1
or use a file recovery tool or UBCD to retrieve files, i.e burn to disc then bin HDD
and install new drive with fresh XP install.........


Or am I missing summet here? Oh well just a few options I suppose.

Unfortunately, you've missed something. I wish it weren't so, though.:( I can't access safe mode. It blue screened even when trying that.The OS is on the drive in question. Spinrite is a data recovery program, but it's going to take a very, very long time to repair the drive. I'm burning Knoppix (dvd bootable linux OS) now. Once that's done, I'm going to boot off that and see if I can get into the drive from there.

MyUserNamesTaken

Well, here I am on Knoppix from the offending machine. Can access the other internal drive from here, plus the USB drive. Can't get into the dodgy drive, though. It's not accessible

MyUserNamesTaken

OK...

Running off knoppix now. How do I change permissions to allow me to move stuff from one HDD to another? I'm trying to move stuff off my internal 120GB hdd to my external 160GB HDD. Both drives can be seen and I can access the data. Unfortunately, it's saying I only have read permission. The plan is to set up the OS on the 120GB hdd once I've cleared the data off it and reformatted. Then I might be able to get into the dodgy drive through Windows.

Mr_Skint_2

http://ask.metafilter.com/mefi/21181