barnyf said:
Yes, I tried putting the original card back in...still won't boot. I
explained how I got to the C:> in previous post.
Yes, there you mention a "hard disk failure" message. What you do next
turns on the value of the drive's contents.
I'd take that message at face value, and suggest you simply replace the
drive and re-install. Do not bother trying to make the old drive boot if
you have anything of value on it.
Do not attach the old drive to the machine - if it is attached, remove it.
Don't do anything else with it yet, but you might want to put it in a cold
area like a freezer (I'm not kidding; drives suffering thermal failure can
have their lives extended a crucial few minutes with this). Sometimes I've
had to rest an icepack on a drive to get it to run a bit longer.
Alternately, if the drive completely fails, you're looking at a data
recovery service, which will cost hundreds to thousands of dollars. If it
will still spin, you can also try recovery tools like r-studio.
Once the new drive is in and the system is functioning, you can re-attach
the old drive and copy over whatever you can find, or possibly image it to a
spot on the new drive, and recover files from the image. I suggest
imaging simply because I've found that imaging can take the shortest time to
complete, and with a failing drive, minutes can count. If you get error
messages, tell the imaging program to continue rather than restart. If
you don't have an imaging program, you can get the demo version of Acronis
True Image, which will do everything you need to do, for 15 days.
HTH
-pk
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