Topic: crash recovery help, please!

[admkrk]

well, it finally happened and i never got around to backing anything up.

for what ever reason the thing resarted it's self and won't go past the "what mode do you want to start in" screen. no matter which mode i try i still end up back at the same place. can't even boot in safe mode.

i figure i can put in a new hd and install windows. then slave the old hd to get at all my files, programs, ect. and copy them to the new drive. then just reformat the old one and i'm back to norm. does this sound like it'll work? o ris there an easier way to go about it?

[chase]

2 things:

1. Might as well try a repair install.  http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdrepair/indexfullpage.htm

2. If that doesn't work you could always try Knoppix if you are familiar with Linux.  Boot off that to backup your data then format.

Either way, you might want to reformat if it has been a long time but you should at least try to get it to boot so you can retrieve data without yanking out hard drives and such.  Good luck!

[JasonR]

1. Might as well try a repair install.  http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdrepair/indexfullpage.htm

Yup - or do a parallel installation to another directory.  ie: instead of c:\Windows you could install to c:\WinXP, c:\Win2k, etc.
http://www.windowsreinstall.com/winxppro/installxpcdparallell/index.htm

[admkrk]

thanks guys, i have home, so i'm not sure if that would've worked the same or not? anyway, there's no disc, it's on a seperate partition of the hd which i couldn't access. not that big a deal putting in the second hd, exept that there's no space for it, so it's just hanging out the side. unfortuneately, it didn't work out like i thought it would. the first thing that happend on startup was an hour of rewriting files on the old drive. still don't know what that was all about. also no drivers! finaly found the one for the modem. still need to find the monitor one, the screen is just TOO big. i think most of the bigger apps are still there and it looks like i saved all my shows. can't tell for sure, no winamp or frontend. i didn't want to spend the weekend messing w/ this crap, but it could've been a lot longer. think i'll try and keep things a little cleaner from now on.

  thanks again for the suggestions

                  kirk