B
Barbara Clark
Ladies and Gents, I goofed. I'm going to try to describe my problem as
succinctly as possible but please let me know if I've left out info
that would help someone help me. I appreciate your patience and thank
anyone in advance for help.
I'm trying to figure out how to plug my 320 GB drive back in and get
it running to access data on it. I physically removed it to keep
ANYTHING from writing to it, i.e. to protect it from being accessed
during a backup operation with Ghost.
I have 3 physical drives....C: (40GB), E
40GB) and F320 GB). The 40
GB drives are FAT32 and the 320 GB drive is NTFS. I wanted to mirror
my C: drive onto the E: drive so I would have all of my applications
intact in the event of a crash. So first, I copied the entire root
directories of both drives onto the F: drive in separate folders
called "C root," and "E root." There were other things on the F: drive
as well, but the drive was only about 20% full. I also backed up my
critical data onto DVD's.
I unplugged the F: drive, rebooted and used an old copy of GhostPE to
try to mirror the C: drive onto the E:drive. I didn't care about
overwriting anything originally on the E: drive.
I left Ghost running overnight, and the next day the screen video was
distorted with tons of artifacts and the machine was locked up.
Rebooting it went as far as the blue XP Welcome screen and then it
hung forever. I'm the only user on this machine, so no password
dialog.
I was able to boot up in safe mode. In there, I saw that the C: drive
had been changed to H. Several programs (MS Office) would not run
because they were looking for files on the C:drive which was now H. I
figured that getting the drive letter back to C would help things. It
appeared as if the files on C were still intact (I say "appeared").
System Restore would not run.
Disk manager would not let me change the drive letter of the active
system drive so I followed some Microsoft instructions to use regedit
and regedt32 to change it from H back to C.
After this, I couldn't even reboot in safe mode.
In order to protect what might still be intact on the C: drive, I
decided to reinstall XP onto the E: drive, hopefully getting my OS
back so I could then proceed to figure out how to recover from there.
Before doing this, I physically unplugged the C: drive.
I reinstalled XP onto the E: drive successfully, this time making it
an NTFS drive instead of FAT32. Of course, it has re-named the E:
drive C, so I'll call the original (crashed C drive) C' to keep
things straight in my dialog.
With XP Pro running, I plugged in the C' drive and I can see data on
it. The OS named it E of course but I'll still call it C'. But, I
don't know how to get my applications which were installed on it to
run on the new C' drive without reinstalling all of them from scratch.
I can see files and read them. Is there a way to manually move the MS
Office suite from C' to the new C? Is there a way to run System
Restore using the C' System Retstore files to repair C' while I've
booted and am operating off of C:? Sometimes, a Run | Scannow /F has
cleared up many problems in the past, but how can I run Scannow on the
C' drive?
I then powered down and plugged in the 320 GB hard drive. It detects
new hardware but the drive shows up as empty, and doesn't seem to know
that it is NTFS. It shows up as a 120 GB drive, not 320 GB. How can I
get this to show up as NTFS formatted and see the data on it? It seems
that the only way to declare it as NTFS formatted is to go through the
'format' dialog, which I'm afraid will destroy all of the data on it.
Many thanks,
Barbara
succinctly as possible but please let me know if I've left out info
that would help someone help me. I appreciate your patience and thank
anyone in advance for help.
I'm trying to figure out how to plug my 320 GB drive back in and get
it running to access data on it. I physically removed it to keep
ANYTHING from writing to it, i.e. to protect it from being accessed
during a backup operation with Ghost.
I have 3 physical drives....C: (40GB), E
40GB) and F320 GB). The 40GB drives are FAT32 and the 320 GB drive is NTFS. I wanted to mirror
my C: drive onto the E: drive so I would have all of my applications
intact in the event of a crash. So first, I copied the entire root
directories of both drives onto the F: drive in separate folders
called "C root," and "E root." There were other things on the F: drive
as well, but the drive was only about 20% full. I also backed up my
critical data onto DVD's.
I unplugged the F: drive, rebooted and used an old copy of GhostPE to
try to mirror the C: drive onto the E:drive. I didn't care about
overwriting anything originally on the E: drive.
I left Ghost running overnight, and the next day the screen video was
distorted with tons of artifacts and the machine was locked up.
Rebooting it went as far as the blue XP Welcome screen and then it
hung forever. I'm the only user on this machine, so no password
dialog.
I was able to boot up in safe mode. In there, I saw that the C: drive
had been changed to H. Several programs (MS Office) would not run
because they were looking for files on the C:drive which was now H. I
figured that getting the drive letter back to C would help things. It
appeared as if the files on C were still intact (I say "appeared").
System Restore would not run.
Disk manager would not let me change the drive letter of the active
system drive so I followed some Microsoft instructions to use regedit
and regedt32 to change it from H back to C.
After this, I couldn't even reboot in safe mode.
In order to protect what might still be intact on the C: drive, I
decided to reinstall XP onto the E: drive, hopefully getting my OS
back so I could then proceed to figure out how to recover from there.
Before doing this, I physically unplugged the C: drive.
I reinstalled XP onto the E: drive successfully, this time making it
an NTFS drive instead of FAT32. Of course, it has re-named the E:
drive C, so I'll call the original (crashed C drive) C' to keep
things straight in my dialog.
With XP Pro running, I plugged in the C' drive and I can see data on
it. The OS named it E of course but I'll still call it C'. But, I
don't know how to get my applications which were installed on it to
run on the new C' drive without reinstalling all of them from scratch.
I can see files and read them. Is there a way to manually move the MS
Office suite from C' to the new C? Is there a way to run System
Restore using the C' System Retstore files to repair C' while I've
booted and am operating off of C:? Sometimes, a Run | Scannow /F has
cleared up many problems in the past, but how can I run Scannow on the
C' drive?
I then powered down and plugged in the 320 GB hard drive. It detects
new hardware but the drive shows up as empty, and doesn't seem to know
that it is NTFS. It shows up as a 120 GB drive, not 320 GB. How can I
get this to show up as NTFS formatted and see the data on it? It seems
that the only way to declare it as NTFS formatted is to go through the
'format' dialog, which I'm afraid will destroy all of the data on it.
Many thanks,
Barbara