DescentBB

I have a system running win2k on drive H.
Drive C which has the original installation of win2k became corrupted so I installed a new incarnation on the H drive.
The H drive is on a different physical drive than the C drive.

Can I insert a windowsXP disk and have it install on the C drive?

If I do will the H drive incarnation of win2k still be available to me? For example right now on boot up I can choose to boot to either of the win2k operating systems...the good one on the H drive or the flakey one on the C drive.

Yes, XP will sort things out. Just don't go installing a 9x series OS or anything.

Oh, and to be safe or for fun, take a look at and save a backup of your c:\boot.ini file.

I'm not finding that file, on C or H.

Thats cause its a hidden system file.

Open up "My Computer" and click on Tools -> Options and match the circled settings above.

[offtrack]
ooh whazzat skin?
[/offtrack]

I tried the hidden file thingy but didn't see it. I figured I just didn't know where to look so I went ahead and tried to install on the old, unused C drive...
The installation got through most of the steps then when it got to the point where it said it was installing the OS with only one step left it stopped....something about a missing file...
Now I'm screwed! Can't get into any of the 3 physical drives on the machine. I'm taking it apart right now and going to install just one physical drive and try to install XP on it. If I get that far I'll worry about retrieving the data from the other two.
(note to self, a back up of 20Gig's of MP3's and all documents, including downloaded drivers etc. is good to make on a different drive but it's BEST if that seperate drive actually in a different machine!)

[edit]
Well that didn't work, I get the same error.

Here's the error message:

Installation failed:D\I386\asms. Error message : Data error (cyclic redundancy check).

Arbitar wrote:[offtrack]
ooh whazzat skin?
[/offtrack]

CoolXP2 Blue, slightly modified.

Will. did you try formatting the C drive or do you have too much info on it? Seems though that you could format C and then get into your other drive letters.

Yea, I put the xp cd in and booted from it via the bios boot order selection.
Proceeded to use the cd to format and install on the C drive.
Now I've used a win2k cd, done the same thing and 2k installed all the way *but* it doesn't recognize the other drive WD 160gig, the one with all my data...drivers...etc. on it! The WD 160gig needs to be on a controller card to be recognized and my floppy drive decided to crap out so I can't install the drivers so win2k doesn't recognize the drive is there!
The bios knows it's there but win2k wants to install a driver for it...

Say it with me: Will Robinson is a dumbass because he didn't back up stuff on CD's!!!

I guess I'll take a floppy drive out of another box and hope it lasts long enough to install drivers for the Promise controller card and/or the WD HDD.

So why don't you disconnet the hardrive that has C and leave H plugged in? See if you can boot directly into H (make sure you redo primary slave connects though).

Tried that, H doesn't seem to be found, I'm thinking I screwed the master boot record. I assumed the MBR would have been on the H drive since that's where the functioning OS was.....ass--uming

Now I'm thinking the MBR was always on the C drive...or in bios or something since once I tried to wipe C and install XP the H drive has not been readable.

See what happens when you plow ahead without good intel?!? Who knows, I may find the WMD's if I ever get it booted again

Will Robinson wrote:Tried that, H doesn't seem to be found, I'm thinking I screwed the master boot record. I assumed the MBR would have been on the H drive since that's where the functioning OS was.....***--uming

Ok, each hard drive has its own master boot record. Doesn't matter if it has an OS on it or not, it has one. That being said, did you double-check the jumper settings on the drive? Some drives (particularly western digital drives) need to be set to "Single Master" in order to work properly.

Now, if you still can't break into the drives, download a bootable linux distro (Knoppix, Mandrake Move, etc) and boot off of the CD (it won't modify ANYTHING on your computer, you're running everything off of that CD) and see if you can pick up anything.

Or Will, I don't suppose when you origanally loaded your os that you followed directions and made a bootable disk for it?

woodchip wrote:Or Will, I don't suppose when you origanally loaded your os that you followed directions and made a bootable disk for it?

Thats for 9x. You can make an "Emergency Restore Disk" in Win2k by using the Backup tool. (Do a search of the help file, and it'll point you to the instructions on how to make one. It'll use atleast one floppy disk.) I think thats still present in XP as well.

MD-2389 wrote:

woodchip wrote:Or Will, I don't suppose when you origanally loaded your os that you followed directions and made a bootable disk for it?

Thats for 9x. You can make an "Emergency Restore Disk" in Win2k by using the Backup tool. (Do a search of the help file, and it'll point you to the instructions on how to make one. It'll use atleast one floppy disk.) I think thats still present in XP as well.

Yea tried that, floppy drive died on me and to tell the truth I've never been able to make one work. 'puters don't like me I had to call people on the phone one time just find someone who could talk me through exiting a DOS prompt! I must have typed every word in the english and spanish languages that means exit except the right one! Still don't rememeber, was it 'Quit' or 'Exit'?

Will Robinson wrote:Yea tried that, floppy drive died on me and to tell the truth I've never been able to make one work. 'puters don't like me I had to call people on the phone one time just find someone who could talk me through exiting a DOS prompt! I must have typed every word in the english and spanish languages that means exit except the right one! Still don't rememeber, was it 'Quit' or 'Exit'?

Exit.

As for a floppy drive, they're just as easy to install as a hard drive. You just have to remember that the cable is often oriented the opposite way of how you would on a hard drive. They're usually keyed so that they'll only go in one way so you'll have a hard time screwing that up. The only part you have to really pay attention to is hooking up the power cable. Thats keyed too, but its pretty easy to hook it up wrong if you're not paying attention. Just remember to line it up from the bottom and slide it along the plastic tab into the pins and you're set. Then just mount it in the case, and screw it in. Just be aware that they often use fine-threaded screws (as opposed to the coarse-threaded ones that damn near every other component uses).

Used to be that the data cable had a pink line along one edge. That side of the connector plugged into the side of the cd drive that had the number one pin. Like MD said, they now have notchs on the plugs that have to marry up. Don't forget on the mother board there is a certain slot for the cd drive cable to plug into.

woodchip wrote:Used to be that the data cable had a pink line along one edge. That side of the connector plugged into the side of the cd drive that had the number one pin. Like MD said, they now have notchs on the plugs that have to marry up.

Actually, they still have the pin one wire marked. However, its not always the same color all around. I've seen them striped red, solid red, striped green, solid green, and solid purple. As for the notches, thats not anything new. Thats been done for as long as I can remember.

Don't forget on the mother board there is a certain slot for the cd drive cable to plug into.

Nitpick: There is no "certain slot" for "cd drives". You're referring to the secondary IDE interface, and that can be used by ANY IDE device, not just CD-ROM drives.

That being said, any luck Will?

MD-2389 wrote:That being said, any luck Will?

Not really, the 160gig drive is still unreadable. I got Partition Magic as per Woodchips suggestion but apparantly it can't read a dynamic drive. I found out that I can't revert it back to basic because it will destroy the data. I can't create a new volume for the same reason.

I downloaded the demo of GetDataBack for NTFS but trying to scan a drive that big seems to be an overload for the memory in the machine I put it in.
If I scan a quarter of it at a time it shows me stuff...like my whole MP3 directory, complete with sub folders still in alphabetical order *but* there isn't anything in the folders. Maybe that actual data is on other sectors or maybe they are toast.

So I don't know if the data is recoverable, it probably is because I've been careful to not do anything that would write to the drive.

Using Western Digital Hard Drive Data LifeGuard Tools a complete media scan that took 2 hours wouldn't fix it and it showed an error code that was something like "unrepairable condition, replace drive".

I'm still holding on to it, when I get my new machine built this weekend it will have 1 gig of memory and a nice clean, new hard drive so I'll probably buy the registration for the GetDataBack and see what happens.

What's really sad is I was having trouble with that computer and so I started backing up everything to the 160 gig drive with the intention of moving it to the new machine which I hurried to order the components for...to avoid the situation I'm in!

I should have just waited until the new machine was online, removed the drive and *then* install XP over the old machine's OS. Since the components took too long to get here I got impatient and decided to go put the new OS on it before I removed the big hard drive from the box. Big dumbass is me!

Will, try this. Get the new machine set up, get your O.S. loaded and any drivers to make things operational.
Load partition magic.
When your done hook the 160 drive as a slave to the new hdd. (set operational drive as Master)
Boot up and open up partition magic (not boot magic) and see if your problem drive shows up. Don't do anything and check back here and let us know what you see.

Thanks for the help guys. Woodchip, most of the options in Partition Magic aren't available in this situation because it see's the drive as a dynamic drive with no volumes on it.

The good news is I was able to get GetDataBack for NTFS to work by puting the drive in a machine with enough RAM to hold the whole scan of the problem drive.
So I was able to recover a lot of the data. All the MP3's and many gig's of digital photgraphs etc.
That and the documents folder full of stuff that would have been impossible to replace.
There were some bad sectors so I'll probably end up remembering something and find it missing but for now I'm a happy spawncamper.

Thanks for the help guys. Woodchip, most of the options in Partition Magic aren't available in this situation because it see's the drive as a dynamic drive with no volumes on it. Will

Is that because you tried to load pm on the problem drive?

No, it's just that the part of the file system on the bad drive that identifies itself was corrupted so Partition Magic couldn't find a way to interact with it without destroying the data. It would only let me create a new volume and a few other steps, all of them involved writing over some or all of the bad drive.

For some reason GetDataBack is able to read it though.

I got Partition Magic and Ghost bundled at BestBuy and I'll be making good use of them both so it's all good in the end.

Good to hear you recovered most of your data.