A week ago my XP emachines computer boot drive (C:, a 60gig Seagate partitioned with a recovery partition) started to go bad so that it hangs when trying to boot. Once I was able to boot to safe mode with command prompt, and once I almost got it to boot normally (only hung after displaying the desktop icons), but I can't do these anymore.
There's a second hard drive, call it F:, a 40gig Seagate. No reason to think there's anything wrong with it.
I need some data off of both drives if possible.
I tried swapping the jumper settings and booting off of F:, which has XP from a previous computer, but this gives a STOP error, B7 I believe. That's expected I guess.
So, I bought a new Vista computer (which may itself go back to the store as defective, but at least eventually I envision owning a Vista computer).
I can't put the old hard drives in the new computer because I don't think the old technology is supported in this machine, with its 320 gig hard drives. (Haven't dared to open it up to check for sure.)
I bought a Nexxtech USB enclosure and that didn't work with either drive (though it failed to work in different ways). However it doesn't claim on the packaging to work with Vista, and there's no updated driver on their site for Vista, so I need to try a different enclosure.
Now, the last thing I tried is to make some bootable floppies on my work XP machine. It boots as "Windows Millennium command prompt." And on my computer, it only gives me a "C:" hard drive, which appears to be the recovery partition of C:. Useless.
The BIOS recognizes both drives. So why can't I access them with the command prompt?
What would you do in my shoes, to try to get data off of these drives?
Thanks.
There's a second hard drive, call it F:, a 40gig Seagate. No reason to think there's anything wrong with it.
I need some data off of both drives if possible.
I tried swapping the jumper settings and booting off of F:, which has XP from a previous computer, but this gives a STOP error, B7 I believe. That's expected I guess.
So, I bought a new Vista computer (which may itself go back to the store as defective, but at least eventually I envision owning a Vista computer).
I can't put the old hard drives in the new computer because I don't think the old technology is supported in this machine, with its 320 gig hard drives. (Haven't dared to open it up to check for sure.)
I bought a Nexxtech USB enclosure and that didn't work with either drive (though it failed to work in different ways). However it doesn't claim on the packaging to work with Vista, and there's no updated driver on their site for Vista, so I need to try a different enclosure.
Now, the last thing I tried is to make some bootable floppies on my work XP machine. It boots as "Windows Millennium command prompt." And on my computer, it only gives me a "C:" hard drive, which appears to be the recovery partition of C:. Useless.
The BIOS recognizes both drives. So why can't I access them with the command prompt?
What would you do in my shoes, to try to get data off of these drives?
Thanks.