Man the agony.
I put another drive into the computer and loaded XP/SP2 onto it, hoping to be able to read the original drive, which is now F drive (actually it is F and G since the drive is partitioned, unfortunately the F drive is the one that has the OS and my files on it. The G drive is OK, can be read normally, but it has nothing on it I want.
The F drive is indicating that it is RAW, and will not respond to any input from the new C drive or XP. (it was originally NTSF).
I have been playing with a couple of recovery programs (free to evaluate but a cost if I want to copy anything that is recovered) but they are very slow and so far nothing usable has come out of them, apart from my pictures maybe and a couple of essays my kids wrote for school. One of my files has a lot of data on it written over a couple of years, and it is obviously fragmented. Unless I can find the pieces I will be mighty upset about losing that one.
I can get the drive professionally read for around $100, has anyone done that and what was the result? Has anyone used a recovery program and did it work? They sell for around $80, but if they are OK I could always justify it for future use.
I have no recent backups and although I know they are important, that drive was fairly new, and has lots and lots of stuff on it. Backing up would have been impractical. Even now, I don't see backing up as practical. I would need a monster drive to store all the data I don't want to lose.
So it looks as if the drive itself is working, and the problem is in the boot files (It stops at Config/System.alt during safe mode bootup) . If there was a way to load them again and recover the disk long enough to copy the really important stuff, I would be grateful to learn..
Last edited by boofhead; 10th Feb 2006 at 08:07.