How can I examine a clobbered HD?

[mr_curious]

I have a HD that I removed from an XP machine. I removed the HD after an attempted SP3 update totally screwed up my machine (Thank you, Microsoft; I've finally learned the lesson I should have learned long ago about trusting M$FT updates.)

I think I could resurrect this drive *if* I could install it in a bootable machine. If I could do that, I could then examine it and perhaps fix what's wrong.

But it was a C: drive, and clearly, XP has to be able to recognize this as something other than a C: drive. I figure I'll need some software to do this, and also, I have to be able to connect it to be recognized as "hard drive other than the boot drive".

Anyone have any experience at this, or any ideas?

 

[Wamphryi]

If you attach the HDD in question to an external HDD set up then it will simply see the Drive and assign a letter that is available. If you attach it to another internal SATA then you may need to initialize the drive and it will be assigned another drive letter. If however it is an IDE drive then you must attach it to the secondary controller or a seperate IDE RAID controller as IDE does not deal with two system drives on the same controller. The best thing you can do is get your data off the HDD then format it and reinstall XP and apply Service Pack 3 before installing applications and copying back your Data. Once XP is broken then that is that.

 

[mr_curious]

Thank you Wamph. and Anon. for the suggestions. Helpful.