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 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