HELP with hard disk problems

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tracy Oldfield
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Tracy Oldfield

I've had an 'unmountable boot volume' BSoD today, which I
tried to sort out using the xp cd and the recovery
console (as per http://support.microsoft.com/?
kbid=297185) when I *finally* got it to recognise the
hard drive (many restarts later) chkdsk is saying it has
one or more unrecoverable problems. I tried to run
fixboot and that didn't work either because it's an NTFS
file system. I'm figuring I need a full sector mending
scan doing, but really want to get my data off first :-(
is there any way I can do this without spending big bucks?
 
FIXBOOT doesnt care if its FAT or NTFS actually, sounds like you might have
an issue with the drive itself. If you have the room you can do a parallel
installation and try to get to the data that way (it also might tell you if
the hardware is bad).
 
Depends on how you define "Big Bucks". I did this last year. Went to Sam's
Club, bought an 80 gig hard drive for $89.00. Took out my existing hard
drive, loaded the new one and installed Windows 98. (I was lucky, I had kept
my old W95 disc, so it worked as an upgrade). After getting it up and
running, I downloded and installed an NTFS to FAT32 file reader from
Winternals (Don't know if they are still around). I plugged in the
"Original" hard drive, moved the jumper (some have selector switches) to
"Slave", booted up.

It appeared as drive "E" in explorer. I copied everything except the Windows
folder to my new hard drive. I shut down, took out my new hard drive, reset
the jumpers on the "Original" hard drive, rebooted with the "Recovery Disc"
(which wiped clean the hard drive). Got every thing working great, installed
my new hard drive as a slave, and spent days moving my saved data around.
Whew!

Hope this helps.
 
-----Original Message-----
FIXBOOT doesnt care if its FAT or NTFS actually, sounds like you might have
an issue with the drive itself. If you have the room you can do a parallel
installation and try to get to the data that way (it also might tell you if
the hardware is bad).
Click to expand...
yet the message tells me otherwise... I'll get it
checked over before tinkering with parallel installations!

Tracy
 
-----Original Message-----
Depends on how you define "Big Bucks". I did this last year. Went to Sam's
Club, bought an 80 gig hard drive for $89.00. Took out my existing hard
drive, loaded the new one and installed Windows 98. (I was lucky, I had kept
my old W95 disc, so it worked as an upgrade). After getting it up and
running, I downloded and installed an NTFS to FAT32 file reader from
Winternals (Don't know if they are still around). I plugged in the
"Original" hard drive, moved the jumper (some have selector switches) to
"Slave", booted up.

It appeared as drive "E" in explorer. I copied everything except the Windows
folder to my new hard drive. I shut down, took out my new hard drive, reset
the jumpers on the "Original" hard drive, rebooted with the "Recovery Disc"
(which wiped clean the hard drive). Got every thing working great, installed
my new hard drive as a slave, and spent days moving my saved data around.
Whew!

Hope this helps.
Click to expand...
pretty tricky with a laptop, but ta for the thought!
would have to get an external one or something.

Tracy
 
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