Hard Drive Crash-Access from another drive

[lauramcc]

My hard drive crashed seemingly due to a trojan horse. Unfortunately I did not have a recent back up. So I hooked it up as a slave to another drive. I can access some of the data, but my most recent data is not accessable. I'm sure this is because of the password protection on a different profile.

I am using Windows XP Home Edition which does not have the administrator tools that professional does. Isn't there a way that I can get around the security and log in through DOS?

Do I need to use the old motherboard with the new drive in order to do this?

I know there has to be a way to do this and I am desperate to get my data off of the drive.

Please HELP!!!!!

 

[CCT]

Background please: Did you try a repair install? No data loss with that.

Can you get hold of/make a Win98 startup disk?

 

[lauramcc]

Can't access password protected files on bad drive

Thank you for responding!

Yes I did try a repair/re-install and it would not do it. It said that the drive was bad. I haven't lost any data as far as I can tell. Like I said in the original thread, I could get to the data that was not protected by a password.

I have a Windows 98 system disk and I think I do have a startup disk somewhere, but why do I need that when I am running Windows XP on the drive?

I am submitting the quarantined Trojan Horse infected file to Symantec. I had a slight problem doing it and I need to call them to get it submitted. Hopefully they can come up with a fix for it.

In the meantime, I really do need to get to my data on that disk.

 

[Rik]

I very much doubt a windows 98 disk will be any good as 98 only used fat and fat32. Xp on the other hand usually uses ntfs.

Put the hard drive back in its original pc and try booting into safe mode by pressing f8 as xp begins to load. You may be able to get at your data that way as long as you have somewhere to back it up to.

 

[lauramcc]

Rik - the drive will not boot at all. That's my dilemma.

You should download the IE spell checker "ieSpell". It works great with this spell checker.

 

[Rik]

If the drive wont even begin to boot then you may need to check the boot sequency in your bios, your mobo manual will help with that.

I'm happy with the Google spell checker thanx, its quick and easy to use.
It seems to "learn" quite well.

 

[lauramcc]

What is a mobo manual?

 

[lauramcc]

I have already tried to boot the drive with a different motherboard/bios. The drive is already set to boot off the CD first, if I remember right.

 

[Rik]

Mobo = motherboard, it should have come with a manual. If not, you will have to have a look at it to see what make and model the mobo is and i will see what i can find. On a majority of mobo's the information is usually between the pci slots or somewhere near the processor.

 

[lauramcc]

I do have the manual for my mobo. It is a Gigabyte P4 Titan and has a back-up bios. There are instructions on accessing the bios. Should I put the drive back in this computer and follow these instrcutions to switch it to run off of the back-up? Will this help? It also has settings for wide range protection, auto recovery, halt on error, keep DMI data, and BIOS recovery settings. I think I will go in and see how the settings are to begin with. Maybe the halt on error and auto recovery settings should be changed?

 

[Rik]

It may be worth a try, let me know how you get on.