Hi guys,

I just want to poll the player base to see if they have any ideas for me to recover my computer. I'm trying to find the best way to recover my stuff, but I want to be really careful, and I don't want to lose old files. I also miss being able to play the game, as I can't and won't use my work computer for games. (I want to find the 13th Astral Sphere, see the new valley, and just hang out again).

Anyway, here's my situation. I have a Dell I bought in 2001. I have Windows 2000 on the C: Drive. Later I added a Second Hard Drive and installed Windows XP Pro on it, so I have a dual-boot PC--no partition nonsense, 2 80 GB hard disks. Both are formatted as NTFS, not FAT or FAT32. It's a standard Ultra ATA/100 interface.

So, one morning the C: drive was going really really slow. After a forced shutdown/reboot I got a Windows couldn't find the config file. No problem, I just would copy my files over to the other drive. So, I booted XP, but found I couldn't find the C: drive. After being able to run Chkdsk, I was able to access it. And after several tries I've copied all the files I wanted from C: to F:

But here's the problem. After a random amount of time on the XP partition, the computer will freeze. Some diagnostics say I have an MBR problem. I plan on removing the old C: drive and replacing it with a brand new drive but I have a few questions before I do this.

1) Would Running a FixMBR or FixBoot stabilize the system, at least so I can boot from F: without it freezing?

1) Assuming I put a brand new drive in C: and put XP on it, will I still be able to access the F: drive. I don't care if it boots, I just want to have my data!

2) Is there anything else I should be checking? I just want to make sure this isn't a card problem or something else. It's weird--I've tried using BartPE and the same problem happens--after a while it can't find either Hard Disk.

I want to have my system fully back up by Thanksgiving. Any help would be appreciated. (But please don't give me a "buy a new computer", "get a Mac", or "use Linux" answer).

Probably with removing the disk that C: is on XP will run smoothly again unless it also got damaged. I'd say try fixboot and fixmbr on the C: disk and see if that does anything, same for XP if it also has problems. Two installations of XP can perfectly access eachother's files. A little something else you could do is get a linux distro that runs from cd and use that to poke around your harddisks with. Should eliminate the problem being your OS and not your hardware. But my first impression is your C: disk is just dying slowly. Could be a virus though if both disks are getting the same problem. Or something else broken.

Can't you just put the drive in someone else's computer and backup the files? Then you could twiddle with your drives as much as you want.

In most cases, Jillian would be right, however, if what I think happened happened, then Linux will not help you at all. I'll look up the specifics once I get home (I'm at work now) but I'll tell you it has to do with the fact that it's formatted with NTFS. Not saying anything is wrong with NTFS, but it has certain security features that may be affecting your computer. I had a similar problem on my computer recently. Anyway, like I said, I'll look up the specifics and post when I get home.

Well, I tried BartPE, which uses Windows but is it's one "Pre-Boot Environment". I just want to make sure the files I copied to F: are saved if I replace C:. The security I use for these files is Everyone, no special user or encrypted disks.

I'm actually trying to copy all those files to a networked disk but the OS doesn't appear to be stable enough to last long enough to copy.

Storing data on an NTFS partition shouldn't affect your ability to read the data anywhere else. Whichever computer you take the disk to (assuming its Win2000 or above) it is possible if you have admin rights on that PC to take ownership of all files on all connected HD's. The exception to this would be if you had used EFS.

If the second disk is currently set up as a dynamic disk, then you may have to go into disk management on the newly installed/dfferent PC and "import foreign disk".

If your going to be buying a new disk to replace C anyway, then if your worried about data loss, take both old drives out, put the new one in and install XP then plug the D drive back in when its installed. No chance of deleteing/formating your data if the drive isnt plugged in!

You say you have the same problem in BartPE? If you want to make sure it is the old C drive causing a prob, disconnect the C drive, boot into BartPE and see if it still crashes. If it doesn't crash then the problem is that drive.

It doesn't matter what security YOU have it set to, it's deeper than that. I totally forgot to look it up, sorry, I'll get on that and get back to you. I remember the resolution is either complicated or a pain in the butt, because I have the exact same problem on my dual boot Windows Server 2003/Windows XP machine (Don't ask me why I dual-booted that, hindsight makes me feel stupid) The advice I have for you is that once you get this problem resolved, _don't_ do another dual-boot, in my own personal experience and the personal experience of many techs and admins I have spoken to, it causes more problems than it is worth.