Hosed my system.

[LA_MERC_th33_r00k]

Well I somehow hosed my previous HD into thinking that it needed to try and install XP. I adjusted my HD boot priority and installed a new XP OS on my spare HD I received from Andy. It is now up and running fine. What I need to know is how to recover data from the other HD? How do I search it out on my computer?

Thank you,

Aimlessly running blindfolded in a forest in Montana.

[LA_MERC_YellowDog]

Well, if the hard drive is connected to the mother board, then windows should see it, and assign it the next drive letter... You should then be able to brows all the files on the drive.. or even boot from the other drive to get it running off the old OS.

[Ab1dab1]

Rook,

Dog is right. Go to Settings - Administrative Tools - Computer Management. Then select Storage - Disk Management.

You should see the other hard drive, but you may need to assign a drive letter to it in Windows. If you don't see the drive there, chances are you corrupted the Master Boot Record (MBR).

To fix the MBR, go ahead and disconnect the second hard drive you had and only leave the one that was bad in the system. Boot from the windows XP CD, press the "R" key in the setup in order to start the recovery console. Select your windows XP installation from the list, and enter the administrator password. Enter the command: "FIXMBR" (without the quotes) at the input prompt and confirm the next question with a "Y" (without the quotes). Use exit to restore the computer.

This will reload the MBR on your hard drive. Several things can corrupt it from viruses to boot managers (trying to install a second OS, etc).

Let me know if this helps.

Abi

[LA_MERC_YellowDog]

Yea,,, Abi just put it much more eloquently than me.... And he is Uber I.T. support. :)

[Ab1dab1]

Let me know if it works out Rook.

I've even resurrected some hard drives that people thought were DOA using that.

MS was supposed to change MBR for NTFS with Vista, but that feature got yanked. The next version of the disk formats are supposed to take in the advantages of unix file systems and NFS, by using a database instead of an MBR (all the MBR does is list start and stop windows for the partitions on your drive).

At any rate, let me know if there is anything else I can do to help.

Abi

[LA_MERC_MadMAX]

The Master Boot Record wouldn't matter if he's just slaving it - All he wants to do is get data off -

Just hook it up, Windows should assign a drive letter too it - drag your files off...then I would just format the drive, and move all my data back to keep the OS and Data seperate - oh and stick your windows swap file on the other drive too...

[LA_MERC_T4rg3T]

oh and stick your windows swap file on the other drive too...

You would only want to do that if your older drive was the same speed as your new drive. You wouldn't want to put your swap file on a older slower drive, it would defeat the purpose which moving it in the first place has little performance gains.