Alright, this is somewhat complicated, so bear with me while I explain.
My computer, for the past few weeks, has been taking longer and longer to boot up. Fearing that the hard drive might be going, I bought a new one with the purpose of backing up the data I wanted to keep. This I accomplished.
Today, when I went to turn on my computer, it would start loading Windows, hang after the loading screen, and then reboot. Having heard that this sort of thing works every now and then, I jammed my hard drive in the freezer for about 20 minutes and quickly plugged it into my computer. The hard drive successfully loaded Windows after this deep freeze, and I began the process of imaging the hard drive onto my new hard drive.
About halfway through this procedure, the hard drive died.
I switched my new hard drive over the master and stuck in my Windows XP CD. The installation seemed to go fine, so I installed a few critical programs. Then I realized that I had not installed Java, yet there it was, sitting on the hard drive. I looked around the rest of the folders and saw that there were partially complete installations of all sorts of programs from my old hard drive. I purged these files as best I could, installed a few drivers, and rebooted.
Upon reboot, I was asked which Windows XP installation I wanted to run.
Obviously, approximately half of my old hard drive made it onto the new one, so there is a ridiculous amount of half-complete programs (including an "installation" of Windows), obsolete registry entires, and the like. My problem is that I have a rather large amount of data that I *really* do not want to lose and no hard drives upon which to park it while I format/reinstall Windows. I would really prefer to not buy another hard drive.
Is there a partition utility which can create a new, blank NTFS partition without formatting the entire hard drive? Failing that, are there any other solutions you can see to my problem?
My computer, for the past few weeks, has been taking longer and longer to boot up. Fearing that the hard drive might be going, I bought a new one with the purpose of backing up the data I wanted to keep. This I accomplished.
Today, when I went to turn on my computer, it would start loading Windows, hang after the loading screen, and then reboot. Having heard that this sort of thing works every now and then, I jammed my hard drive in the freezer for about 20 minutes and quickly plugged it into my computer. The hard drive successfully loaded Windows after this deep freeze, and I began the process of imaging the hard drive onto my new hard drive.
About halfway through this procedure, the hard drive died.
I switched my new hard drive over the master and stuck in my Windows XP CD. The installation seemed to go fine, so I installed a few critical programs. Then I realized that I had not installed Java, yet there it was, sitting on the hard drive. I looked around the rest of the folders and saw that there were partially complete installations of all sorts of programs from my old hard drive. I purged these files as best I could, installed a few drivers, and rebooted.
Upon reboot, I was asked which Windows XP installation I wanted to run.
Obviously, approximately half of my old hard drive made it onto the new one, so there is a ridiculous amount of half-complete programs (including an "installation" of Windows), obsolete registry entires, and the like. My problem is that I have a rather large amount of data that I *really* do not want to lose and no hard drives upon which to park it while I format/reinstall Windows. I would really prefer to not buy another hard drive.
Is there a partition utility which can create a new, blank NTFS partition without formatting the entire hard drive? Failing that, are there any other solutions you can see to my problem?
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