Hmmm, even with that knowledge I'm still having trouble parsing this "can i look at the old m/c drive contents by creating a network rather than ripping my new m/c open and installing fubar drives? " If you are asking if you can read the failed/failing drive in an external drive enclosure attached to another (working) PC via USB/firewire I would say yes but certain data recovery software may not be able to access it. Personally I would stick it in a working PC as a secondary drive so you can really see what is going on with the drive.
I have done this and it worked in my case. Just connected the drive via USB and used software I downloaded from www.runtime.org. You can use the software for free to see what is recoverable then you have to pay to recover it.
yes - thats what i was thinking of doing - but with some old cat 5 (ethernet) cable in the nic cards.
If you make on a regular basis a disk image on a second hard drisk, you will never get in trouble anymore. For less than 50 $ your problem is solved for ever. Altough you might still miss some data. If you make every week a copy you will always have thta data and you only need to add the changes since the last image was made. Even if you get a virus: just put back the last image aand all the viruses will be gone. The image restores all the setting from windows. Things could be so easy....
Fred, Sorry. I should have pointed out that XP is NT, it used to be called NT before but internally many names still say 'NT'.
cheers nononsense - i have a boot drive, but it has none of those files on it. i cant see any to copy either from what i can see on the c: guess im fucked big style im going for the reinstall tonight. if you have any other ideas im all ears (or eyes!!) fingers crossed!
http://www.data-recovery-software.net/ rstudio is the bees knees. I had a hard drive that would work for an hour before (I guess, overheating?) not working. Hooked it up as a second drive, and over a four day period I imaged a quarter of it at a time using the imaging by sector tool. And hey presto I got 100% recovery. Saved me a lot of tears
Hi fred, In your initial post you wrote: "i can get a c: prompt though." So I assume that you must have got a DOS running somehow? If your HD boot partition is the same as this C: you are seeing, you MUST see these few critical NT files for XP being able to boot. Copying these to a 'boot' diskette should get XP running. If you don't see these files, either your HD was set up differently, or something grave happened. If you got DOS going, perhaps through booting DOS from DOS diskettes, you could try to get more information by running fdisk. This could be dangerous though if you first did not read and understand its workings. Perhaps a safer quick way would be to get Knoppix (free: http://www.knoppix.org/ --- pick the right mirror) and burn yourself a livecd. You'll boot up in linux without installing on your HD. The Knoppix KDE file manager should show you the M$ partitions as well, this in case anything sensible is left on your HD. This if you badly need to recover something valuable. Best is to get help from sombody with experience. There are many ways you can go wrong. Of course, kind of like funster says, you could always hook up another HD (I suggest to temporarily disconnect your current drive). Install a new XP on this drive and when you get it running, connect the old HD again - watch for correct drive hardware ID setting. After that, you should also see your old partitions in this new XP setup and recover these to your new disk. Good luck Fred, nononsense
cheers nononsense. the c: i can get is after loading up the dell utilities disk. god knows what i am seeing!! i can do a dir comand and see a few files only. i have tried to reinstall xp and use the recovery option but it askes for the admin password. any idea what this may be or should i call dell? i tried my computer password but no joy. may burn myself that cd..... thanx.
Fred, There is no way NT(XP) can start without these few files that I indicated above. They are either gone, or you are looking at another partition altogether. Remember, DOS will call anytrhing C: but this may not necessarily correspond to the letter in XP. The knoppix linux cd should show you all partitions (left?) on your HD. If knoppix sees these XP partitions, it should be able to access these without any passwords.