I JUST bought this HDD

[ct2tx]

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Title says it all. I build a new system a few months back, and it seems the HDD is gone. I have lots of info on this drive I dont/cant lose it. Please help!!!

OK, its a WD2500JB. Im using an Asus K8V-MX board, XP Professional and about 512 MB of memory. Now the system worked fine for a few months. THen today, my system was just going sloooow. So I restarted it, and during bootup, it told me that that drive was bad, and that I need to back up and replace, then to click F1. SO i do, and it boots up to that damn blue screen of death---"somthing about Boot Mountable, something like that"

So I just installed XP over my other 60 GB HDD, and try and slave the 250 Drive to start pulling data over. But when i do that, bootup goes all the way to the Windows XP screen, then the screen just goes black and stays there. Any advice, i dont want to reinstall XP pro over my 250 Drive because that will delete all the info, but it seems to be a bad drive now. Any suggestions on how to save my data?

Please?

 

[The_Prophecy]

First of all.... next time you give us the error code from a blue screen, please get the error message EXACTLY as shown.... no shortcuts like "somthing about Boot Mountable, something like that". Luckily I know that you're refering to UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME which means either the file system on the drive is totally screwed, or the drive is dying.

When booting from the 60GB drive, get into safe mode and remove your video driver so that XP uses the generic one. This should fix the screen going black problem....

 

[Codesmith]

I would suggest running the manufacturer's test utility on the Drive.

Also make sure that you upgrade XP to SP2 to support large drives and if the 250 is SATA make sure you have the correct controller drivers installed.

If the drive tests fine then it could just be a driver issue.

If the drive fails the tests and you cannot boot windows with it installed there is a work arround.

Often if you wait until windows is fully loaded before connecting the drive it will work. For PATA drives this means using an IDE to USB adapter or an external enclosure, for SATA you have the additional option of starting with the power connected but not the data cable, then connecting the data cable after windows finished loading.

SATA is almost always hotswapable.

Additionally you may want to try data recovery tools such as GetDataBack NTFS, which reads what it can off the drive without changing it.

An alternate approach would be something like spinrite which tried its best to repair the drive so that you can copy your files.

I have never used spinrite, but plan on giving it a whirl the next time I have a failing hard drive.