I have a hard drive and the operating system has gone down, or should I say, that partition. The drive was partitioned into sectors C: and D: D: has a stack load of digital photos of the family, countryside, churches and holidays and I don't want to lose them.

C: Just has the operating system on it (Windows XP Professional and other program files such as MS Office, Corel Draw etc.

How do I get things working again without deleting anything in D: please?

BTW the whole lot crashed when I was trying to swap digital photos from the flash card to a new folder via a USB Card Reader.

Can you explain what you mean by "gone down". You may be able to do a repair to get it operational again.

And I'm guessing you don't have a backup. If it were me I'd obtain:

A Linux "Live" Cd
A large USB memory stick

and boot the Linux CD and get those photos copied onto the memory stick before I did anything to repair the OS.

Mmm, I guess the details were a bit brief. I can't boot up the PC. It fires up and gets to the point were it asks if I want to open in 'Safe Mode' etc. Whichever I choose the PC continues onto a flash of blue screen and then a complete cycle of what went on before.

With regard to the D: partition, it contains over 20,000 photographs from March 2003 and several hundred MP3 files. I have several documents and Excel files up to 290 pages and 11,000 cells. There's stack of other stuff I don't want to loose. 60GB in fact. I have no way of transferring any files as I can't see them. I did get to MS-DOS at one point and only D: was there.

i assume you have no xp cd to try a repair

It must be the week for it.

I had something similar happen on Monday and have just finished installing a new hard disc and XP on it. :(

Fortunately, I did exactly what alcresearch said - got a 'Live CD' distro of Linux (in my case it was DSL - Damn Small Linux) and a large USB memory stick and copied all my data off and stored it on my wife's PC for safekeeping. If you can network it using the Live Linux distro, you MIGHT be able to copy the files on to another machine or FTP site. However, I had problems with this - hence repeated use of a 2Gb memory stick.

Now...IN PRINCIPLE you should be able to install XP back to the C drive partition if you can't repair it using the XP Recovery mode, without affecting D. Alternatively, do you know anyone with a big hard disc that you could copy all your content on to before you start trying to repair XP?

I did try repairing XP on my machine but it was shot to Hell, so although the disc is perfectly readable in my Linux box I cannot get it to boot, despite fixing boot sector, MBR, etc.

However, I'm now the proud owner of a dual-booting laptop with XP and Ubuntu, and it's grand. All I have to do now is re-install all the sofwtare. :rolleyes:

You're going to need somewhere to put all that data, Maplin have a sale of external USB drives until 22/01/08 - eg

http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?ModuleNo=217653&C=Maplin&U=SearchTop&T=External%20Hard%20Drive&doy=10m1

which is good value and will solve your future back-up problems.

With this available a decent PC shop should be able to get your data transferred for a small charge if you take them the USB drive and the drive from your PC.

You might even be able to do it yourself with a live Linux CD if it can see the USB drive attached to your PC.

I might be being over cautious but I would want my data safe before I attempted to rescue the system partition on what might be a failing drive.

Joe...don't you have Acronis ? You can buy it for a tenner on ebay.

well not a great deal to add to that lol.apart from agree try and backup data before trying installing xp again but as said as long as you dont fdisk or format the hole drive again you should be ok installing XP to C again if it comes to that and it actually will.

I would boot from the Windows CD to get to the recovery console and run CHKDSK /R

If this doesn't fix it I'd buy a second hard drive and install Windows on that, leaving the other drive free for data storage.

If the new drive is huge, partition it off and use it for a backup of your original drive. You can use Microsoft Backup to do a weekly or monthly backup to it, although the safest backups are off site ones, just in case your PC catches fire or is stolen.

The loss of your OS could be a software glitch but it could be the sign of an impending drive failure. Get a backup sorted immediately if you value your data.

Joe...don't you have Acronis ? You can buy it for a tenner on ebay.

What I normally do is take regular backups of the My Documents tree, and also my 'Development' tree, which contains all my stuff.

The only things that don't get backed up nightly tend to be the emails - they go on a week cycle.

Getting an image might not be a bad move for the future - although the advantage of starting from scratch is that you don't install all the crap you never use! :)

Good idea though!

Getting an image might not be a bad move for the future - although the advantage of starting from scratch is that you don't install all the crap you never use! :)


With Acronis you just make an image of the 'pristine' install and you can easily revert to it when things get all gunged up :)

It's well worth it. Restoring an image of the system partition takes just a few minutes compared with the hours needed for a re-install of XP, service packs and updates, plus all your apps.

My C: drive is on a 10GB partition and with XP and all my other programs, I use just about 4GB of the space available. The Acronis image of this with normal compression fits easily onto a DVD, but I also keep copies of the image on two external USB drives and the D: partition of my PC's HDD.

I don't use My Documents for any of my data - it's all on the D: drive and backed up to the two USB drives.

There is also a good support forum for Acronis at http://www.wilderssecurity.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65

I managed to obtain a copy of Acronis v10.0 complete with keygens too.

Sorted out a partition, just downloading Ubuntu as I type. Got an hour or so left I reckon.

Linux virgins eh? :rolleyes:

You can re-install windows on the c: partition and it should keep everything on d: if that's what you mean.

Think I might take an image of my pc, much better than just backing the data up on another hdd like I have now.

I created an E: partition. Also, with Acronis I get OS selector that comes with it. Should be easy enough, I'll let y'all know how I get on.

Not to hijack this thread or anything, like. :)

I use Acronis for partitioning and backups.

I have C: D: E: F: G: and H: partitions and backup C: (OS) weekly and the other 4 partitions are backed up monthly.

I use Acronis for partitioning and backups.

I have C: D: E: F: G: and H: partitions and backup C: (OS) weekly and the other 4 partitions are backed up monthly.

Bloody nora! How many partitions can one have?! And for what?! Apart from multiple, multiple, multiple OS's? Yeah I don't know that much as you can tell. :P

Bloody nora! How many partitions can one have?! And for what?! Apart from multiple, multiple, multiple OS's? Yeah I don't know that much as you can tell. :P

You can have 3 primary partitions on a drive, with an extended partition.
Within the extended partition you can define from 1 to 23 or 24 Logical partitions. (I think)

On C: I have my OS D: is a swap file E: is for music/videos F: Photos G: is college work ect and H: is a FAT32 Acronis secure zone for images.
I have 3 hard drives which I need to get around to reformatting them all.
1 WD 74GB Raptor and 2 Seagate 320GB

You can have 3 primary partitions on a drive, with an extended partition.
Within the extended partition you can define from 1 to 23 or 24 Logical partitions. (I think)

On C: I have my OS D: is a swap file E: is for music/videos F: Photos G: is college work ect and H: is a FAT32 Acronis secure zone for images.
I have 3 hard drives which I need to get around to reformatting them all.
1 WD 74GB Raptor and 2 Seagate 320GB

I have no idea what you mean, but I bet it's good. :hihi:

I have no idea what you mean, but I bet it's good. :hihi:

I call it good housekeeping and all nice and neat and tidy. :hihi::hihi:
Last month I had to re-install an OS for a friend at work, she had one 250GB HD and it only had C: Drive and she had lost everything...photos, videos and music. Now she has 3 partitions and backs up the valuable data each month.

I used to back up my music and pictures a lot a while ago, now I'm hardly adding to it, so not much point for me. Although I try and keep my Bookmarks regularly backed up.

Although I try and keep my Bookmarks regularly backed up.

What browser are you using?

Have you thought of keeping all your bookmarks on-line?

I'm using Opera, got sick of IE, and when Firefox used to restart, sometimes it would get rid of the Tab Bookmark thingies at the top - so heard a few good reviews about Opera, tried it - and I kinda like it. :)

Nah, not tried storing them online. Much prefer to store them locally, dunno why.

I'm using Opera, got sick of IE, and when Firefox used to restart, sometimes it would get rid of the Tab Bookmark thingies at the top - so heard a few good reviews about Opera, tried it - and I kinda like it. :)

Nah, not tried storing them online. Much prefer to store them locally, dunno why.

C:\Documents and Settings\user username\Application Data\Opera
backup this file opera6.adr

Just FYI.

I keep a device called a IDE to USB converter handy for machines that die in this fashion.

Basically I remove the IDE drive and then plug it into another machine using USB. The new PC see's the drive as a removable drive (or in your case 2 removable drives) and you can drag the data over you wish to keep.

Its also a good way of formatting drives without having to plug them internally into a PC. You can also use it as a cheap way of having an external DVD drive for a laptop or whatever.

Obviously if the drive is SATA this wouldnt work but I suspect there would be a SATA equivalent.

what message came up on the blue screen ?