How do I get to my HD data when the system will not boot (Pt 2)?
less than 200 MB free.
Anyway, the space on "E" we didn’t need, so I decided to make "J" bigger by taking all but 5 GB of the free space
on "E" and adding it to "J".
I used Partition Magic to move the free space at the top end of "E" to the beginning, which made it contiguous to the
top end of "J", which, as I said, was right at the 1024 cylinder boundary (Partition Magic marks the boundary).
Moving the free space went fine,no problems at all.
I then used Partition Magic to add the free space at the bottom of "E" to the top of "J", and this is where everything hit the fan.
A warning showed up in PM about crossing the 1024 cylinder boundary, but I didn’t think it applied because all I was doing
was adding free space. Naturally, I was wrong – shouldn’t have done it!!!
So, the status of the machine now is this:
(1) the space was moved
(2) the machine comes up in dual-boot mode (as it always has) and asks which OS to start
(3) DOS runs fine, but, of course, sees only the 2 GB "C" drive
(4) If I select booting WIN 2K, it starts normally, at least at first, but then asks to check each drive for errors.
If I let the drive check proceed, it checks each drive and finds no errors. Then the system pops up the blue screen
of death with some message at the top that’s too quick to read (but I did figure it out – see below…), and then
the system re-boots. It just keeps on doing this, and it does the same thing whether or not I allow the disk check
to proceed.
Question is, WHAT TO DO???? I’m ready to make the machine into a boat anchor, but I really need what’s on it. I’m not
concerned about losing applications, and I’m willing to reformat the drive and start from scratch, but we must get the data
back (mostly photos not yet backed up to CD).
(5) Booting from another device? Seems like a good idea – but it doesn’t work! Even if I enter the BIOS at power-up and change
the order of the boot devices, trying to boot from a CD drive, it will not boot! For example, if I insert the Win 2K steup disk
in the CD drive, it still boots from the hard drive. The system does boot from a 3.5" floppy, and I’vedone that several times
using Win 98 and Win ME boot floppies. But they start the system in DOS, not Windows, and it seems like there’s no where to go to
retrieve the hard disk data.
Related Information:
Tagged with: bios • blue screen of death • boat anchor • boots • cylinder boundary • dual boot • free space • gb • hd • Partition Magic • photos • quot • start from scratch
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give the BIOS boot settings one more try,but this time get a BootCD or Knoppix BootCD, or a program called VOLKOV Commander and have the cd inserted in your optical drive,when the system starts.if that doesn’t work,then you will need to open your case and attach another HD with windows installed.or attach it as a slave to a friend’s machine,requiring you to open both your cabinets.first,change the jumpers at the back of your HD to "slave" and the HD with installed os as "master".(usually there are instruction stickers on the disk on how to go about doing this).if this still doesn’t work and your BIOS supports USB,insert a USB storage device,boot up to DOS and use XCOPY to recover your files.but you will have to navigate to the folder where your picture files reside.one other way is to use a program called UNERASE to recover your files from the boot floppy.you can do a google search on all the progarms i mentioned.hope that helps.good luck.
Did you try making it a slave on another machine and accessing it that way? Keep the harddrive on the new machine the master, and make the "broken" hd a slave.