Hi, I did something incredibly stupid today. I am about to build a new computer, and the only part I'm going to salvage from my old build is my hard drive. I decided to install an old ide hard drive in the hopes of backing up all my important data on it. When I slapped it in, configured the jumpers, my computer would either recognize the new drive and not the old one, or it would recognize both and not boot to windows.

I gave up on this, and just removed the drive, but now my computer won't boot to windows at all. It get to the point where it says "Verifying DMI Pool Data..." Now I tried recovering a windows installation with my winxp disc, and it can see the harddrive, and both the partitions. I also used spinrite, which once again, can see my hard drive and partitions. I did not run it because it takes all night, and was hoping to go another way.

I have gone into my bios and tried every combination of boot first that i can think of with no luck. I can't figure out if this is a hard drive failure or not. I actually threw the drive into another computer and it wouldn't boot either, although i'm not sure if that computer even works properly anymore.

I know this is alot to read, and if you have gotten this far I appreciate it. I was thinking of buying an external enclosure and trying to access my data that way. If I can get my data off, I will try reformatting my harddrive and seeing if that will fix it, but would definitely like to salvage all my stuff if i can.

Anybody have any ideas as to what could be causing this?

My specs are as follows...

AMD Athlon Xp 2100+
512 MB of RAM
asus a7n8x-e
geforce 4 ti 4600
160 gb western digital IDE 7200 rpm harddrive
windows xp

thanks

I trust you remembered to re-jumper the XP drive back to single?

If so and as a single drive in the system (not on same controller with CD/DVD drive or other HD) it is recognized by BIOS and set as the 'first' and the first boot drive and it still won't boot you might try running 'fixboot c:' and/or 'fixmbr' from the recovery console.

If nothing works you can install XP to the old working drive and then attach the non-working drive and recover it's data via a program called 'get data back' though perhaps spinrite may also offer data recovery? Not sure. Get data back has saved me on a few occasions.

Don't write to or use the drive if at all possible until you recover the data. I'd maybe try running 'chkdsk' from recovery console but that might or might not loose data.

There may be other ways to go about this so keep waiting for more answers.

You write a lot but omit a few things. However, I am assuming the 160gb drive is the new one. You state 'partitions' , but is that 1 partition on the old drive and 1 on the new. If you are using XP and a 160gb drive,you have to make at least '2' partitions on the new drive, 137gb is the max size it can handle in xp, and when it comes to verifying pool data will hang up the machine.

I did remember to re-jumper teh xp drive back to single. i will try and use the fixboot c like you said, i appreciate it.
I do apologize for omitting such key facts. Yes the 160 gb drive is the new one. the 160 gb drive is the one that has all of my data on it, the one with my OS installed and everything. It is divided into 2 partitions, one being the 127gb and the remaining on a second partition.
Funny I actually just purchased an external hard drive enclosure, and was able to hook up the drive to another pc, and see all of my data. I'm currently moving it to another computer for retreival later. I just don't understand why my pc won't boot up with it.
Now the question is whether or not it will work on the computer I'm about to build here in a little bit. I just can't figure out what the problem is.

Notherdude, fixboot fixed my problem. Thank you so much, you are my hero!

Sweet!

Aptly named utility, eh?