Hard drive problem

[dracan]

Hi. I'm having a bit of trouble with my harddrive. It suddenly started bluescreening halfway through bootup. It said it was in NTFS.SYS. Before reinstalling everything, I want to get my data off it. I've tried putting it as a secondary harddrive in another machine, and it causes the other machine to bluescreen on bootup in the same place :frown: Now as both machines are windows 2000 (and look the same while booting up), I don't actually know whether on my second PC, it's bluescreening because it's trying to mount the faulty harddrive - or whether it's just booting up off the faulty harddrive from the start.

If I've got two harddrives plugged into the same computer (one master, one slave), where both have bootable operating systems on them - will it always boot off the master? Or is it possible it's actually booting off the secondary one (which is the faulty one in my case) ? If it's booting off the secondary one - is there anyway I can force it to boot off the other one, so I can do a normal boot and copy my data from my faulty harddrive?

If it turns out that I was booting off the first one, and it was bluescreening just because it was trying to mount the faulty drive - is there anything else I can try to be able to get the data off it? I've tried cloning my faulty drive using Norton Ghost, but the cloned drive does exactly the same. So, I'm presuming it's not actually a knackered drive - and just some knackered system files? Is this a reasonable assumption?

Thanks for any help with this, as I really need to get at this data,
Regards,
Dan.

 

[Fern]

will it always boot off the master? Or is it possible it's actually booting off the secondary one (which is the faulty one in my case) ? If it's booting off the secondary one - is there anyway I can force it to boot off the other one, so I can do a normal boot and copy my data from my faulty harddrive?

It'll boot off whichever you specify in BIOS. HDD 0 or HDD 1 etc.

I understand winXP has a problem with two identicle OS's on it. Haven't heard taht about win2k (although they are fairly similar in many respects).

Did you run a drive fitness utility on the drive? These are free for the d/l from the manufacturer

Fern

 

[dracan]

I've downloaded the drive diagnostics software, and burnt it to cd. I didn't try it because I was worried that running that diagnostics software could make the situation worse and make my data even more unrecoverable. Although, now I've done the Norton Ghost clone, at least I've got a backup. I'll give the diag software a go tomorrow when I'm back at work.