Good one for you (Hard Drive related)

[Red Barchetta]

NOT MY SYSTEM! - This is my brother-inlaws system I am speaking of, and it has me baffled!
Main drive refuses to boot (Win XP), BUT hook that drive up as slave instead of master, use a differant (in this case my test only) hard drive as master, boot from it (after OS is installed on it), all files are ther and copiable, with the exception of a few that were NOT encrypted, but narked as "Private" - those are the ones he really wanted badly - I managed to get them for him by creating a FAT32 (as oposed to NTFS) partition on that HD and running a FreeDOS bootavle image with NTFSreaed on it - but he is now shrt the "Long file names"
So you know, he uses P2P progs all the time (mainly Wares P2P, or Imesh).
So, the short of it is - I managed to save all his data, BUT what would cause a HD to go out like that, but still be readable with a differant installation, OR a differant OS?

[Faustus]

Sounds like he turned on encryption in Windows XP and now the files are scrabbled. But thats just a guess.

Where the files you extracted readable Lone files names aside?

As far as the main problem. Did it give and error or just time out or what when you tried to boot the drive?

[Red Barchetta]

The actual error I do not recall BUT it was something to the effect of "No system found, please insert a bootable disk...." something of that nature,,,,,
As for files copied - appearently they are all there - his private documents (something I really shouldn't see - nor do I care, I just looked to make sure I had them) all his pics (Yes that inckudes porn - again really nonr of my bussiness - but I think I wish to talk to him about that at least - after-all he is married to my sister) - but yes, it dose appeare that ALL the data is there, just the long file names were lost, the actualy data - it is all there.......

Sounds like he turned on encryption in Windows XP and now the files are scrabbled. But thats just a guess.

Where the files you extracted readable Lone files names aside?

As far as the main problem. Did it give and error or just time out or what when you tried to boot the drive?

[Faustus]

If thats the error then the drive hasn't crashed. Windows has.

[Red Barchetta]

That is EXACTLY what I thought, howeve an attemp to restor the boot recor did not help, am an attemp at system recover failed as well -
Basically, the drive SHOUDL boot but it WILL NOT, but all dat is appearently there (I checked - some as stated before, I kinda wish I hadn't seen, but I did to check if it was copied or not, and it was - those pivs aqre noy really my bussiness - but how can I ignore them totally when you are talting about my sisters husband?)

If thats the error then the drive hasn't crashed. Windows has.

[Faustus]

I'm telling ya. Backup the info, format the drive completely and reinstall and the drive will be good.

[jimmalenko]

winXP has a couple of options to fix the MBR after booting off the CD. There's a recovery console to do specific tasks, or I'm pretty sure there's an "auto" mode which should scan the drive for OS files and restore them back to working order.

As mentioned though, if you can slave it up to another HDD, backup as much as you can and start afresh with a reformat.

[bendixG15]

Anybody check the BIOS to see what the boot sequence is ??

[jollyjohn]

G'day
Try BadCopy to recove lost or invisible data
Good luck
john
How do I send zip files in this forum????????????????????

[jollyjohn]

Or you can have a go at this http://www.digitalwebcast.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=8658-0