Accessing Hard Drive In OS Boot Situation
Jul 7, 2005
My computer has been sporadically crashing to blue screens due to an incompatible driver or drivers, so I tried removing two questionable drivers from the driver folder. It is clearly because I removed these drivers that the computer won't boot. So in order to fix the device driver problem I'll first have to get the operating system running, which means I must put the drivers back in place (I backed them up on the hard drive).So here comes my real question (disregarding compatibility issues which originally led to this boot problem): How can I access those drivers I backed up on the hard drive and put them back in the driver folder without booting up Windows XP? Does a boot disc have the utilities to do this? Is there some way of doing this through the BIOS? Is there an operating system or something that I can run off of a floppy disc or compact disc (which won't require any installation) that I can use to move these files? Maybe at a later date I'll create a thread addressing the driver incompatibility issue that I have, but, for now, I'm only concerned with putting those drivers back in their place so I can get to the next step.
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May 6, 2008
I had a hard drive fail (can't boot up on it) so I installed windows on a second hard drive. I still want to be able to recover the files on the first drive, so is there a way I can just access the drive with both HDs attached to the computer?
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Jun 14, 2009
My motherboard died and I had my files password protected in Windows XP Media Edition, can I connect the SATA hard drive to another PC via USB and unlock the protected files, or does it have to run as the main drive to allow access and entry of password and then making all files public?
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May 25, 2010
I recently bought Fantom Drives 1Tb external hard drive, Model # GF 1000EU. After about a year all computers would stop recognizing the external hard drive. My computers would know it was connected but I would not see it under "My computer." I read through hundreds of forums trying to fix the problem. When nothing worked I decided to take apart the enclosure and remove the hard drive so I could connect it to my desktop pc using a SATA cable. Essentially, I have two hard drives connected to my computer and I want to use one as an external hard drive so I am able to access data from it while still running my computer off of it's original hard drive. Is this possible?
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Jul 4, 2005
does not have problem when connected via legacy controller, problem only when using USB 2.0 card in PCI slot of XP SP2 machine. No blue screen just reset. Something seems to be clobbering memory. Have tried loading new driver, uninstalling and reinstalling driver. Tried multiple USB 2.0 cards as well. Windows/XP Home updates are automatic, therefore very current. Drive is Maxtor external USB.
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Jul 20, 2009
I am running windows xp sp2. My primary computer seems to have had a motherboard meltdown. Left on thursday, would not boot on friday. Cannot get to cmos, or anything. I removed the harddrive and put it in another computer to get work files off of the drive and transfer them to server. On boot it says"error loading operting system".I hooked up the hard drive as a slave and used explorer to go through and get the files. I can see the Desktop directory in documents and settings****desktop, but i get an access denied when i try to get to the files on desktop. I have tried using the Dos Command prompt and have the same result. I have booted in safe mode w/ prompt, same results. I have tried making a user profile with same name and passwords, no luck. These are files on the desktop, not shortcuts. Does anyone know how i can copy these files?
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May 11, 2005
I bought a DELL labtop Inspiron 5052 over two years ago. It got XP Home version. A couple of weeks ago, a cup of coffee was spilled on my laptop. I took it to a computer shop. They contacted Dell and tried to order the labtop motherboard but to no avail as Dell has discontinued manufacturing this type. The warranty is only 1 year. So I decided to use it for spare parts. What 's an expensive cup of coffee ($3500.00). After removing the hard drive (60Gb) from the labtop, I made it as an external USB type hard drive. It was a perfect solution as at least I can save the data. But the fun was a short one as I now experience something to do with 'file access'. Connecting the external hard drive to my PC, I can see all the files and folders on it. The problem is on my Dell laptop I have 2 users setup under Document and Setting. One of the user logon (userA) enforces password while the the other (userB) enfoces no password for logging on. I can open files from userB with no problem but can not open files or folders from userA. It says "Access denied" or "file inaccessible". Is there a way to overcome this ?
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Mar 5, 2008
I am using Windows XP and have two hard drives. Until recently I had Windows installed on one hard drive and all my important files (photos, business files, videos, etc) were also on this drive. My other hard drive was completely empty. Suddenly I started encountering problems with Windows and while I was using Windows it would completely freeze. I would pull the plug on the computer and start it again and then it would be fine - for a few hours - and then it would freeze again. The problem started happening more often and more quickly after rebooting and interestingly I noticed over the course of a few days that the problem seemed to be worse whenever my heater was turned on. I left the heater turned off and didn't encounter a problem again for a couple of days, but then it started happening again and more often even while the heater was turned off. I figured because there seemed to be a correlation with the heater being on and the computer's performance that the fans or the power supply inside the computer were over-clogged with dust. I opened up the computer and thoroughly cleaned out all the dust I was able to and made sure all the fans were dust-free. It didn't help. The computer's condition continued to deteriorate and occasionally when I attempted to re-boot the computer it would completely freeze before getting to the Windows boot screen or it would display the following message.
Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem. Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware. Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information. Over the next couple of days the computer wouldn't get to the Windows loading screen at all and it would only boot to the point of displaying the aforementioned message.I took my computer to my friend's house to see if he could fix it. He said that some of the boot.ini files in my version of Windows were damaged or I had accidentally deleted them somehow. Because I was completely unable to load Windows there was no way to do a System Restore so he came up with an alternative plan. He decided to load a new Windows XP onto my other hard drive and use that drive as my master. He said even though Windows was loaded onto the first drive, I would be able to access the files from it with the new Windows in Windows Explorer. So he did it but then we encountered a new problem. The new Windows works fine but for some reason I am unable to access the files from the other hard drive. I think this is because my original Windows had a password on it. When I used to load Windows you had to type a password to login as me and access my files. Otherwise you could only be a guest. But now when I try to access these files an Error message comes up saying these files cannot be accessed. It doesn't even give me the option to type a password.So basically what I want to know is this: Am I able to recover these files from my original hard drive. I really need them for my business and I have five years of family photos on there that are of high sentimental value to me.
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Jul 16, 2005
I had my hard drive transferred to a new pc. I cannot access the numerous (and important!) files under Documents and Settings/My Username on the new pc. Apparently, Windows has restricted access to those files since it does not recognize me on the new PC. The files all seem to be there (based on the info from the properties of the documents and settings folder), but I cannot see them. Both old and new pc use XP Home.How can I regain access to these files?
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Oct 8, 2008
I recently installed a new hard drive into a friends computer and installed XP Home.
I ran all the updates and service packs.
I left later that day and let him install all his applications.
I got a call tonight from him saying he really screwed up and doesn't know what to do.
I had to follow his thinking over the phone so I hope I get this all correct.
He had trouble loading the drivers for his HP printer. He would get an error saying that a C: empHP_WebRelease folder was missing. He did manage to figure out that for some reason when I installed XP it called the Boot drive "I" instead of "C"
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Mar 4, 2007
I have a brand new install of XP Professional on a Dell with a 3.2Ghz CPU, with 1.5Gig of RAM in it. I setup a mapped drive to my file server from this XP workstation (all this is runing on my home network). As soon as I access this share and start to drill down through its folders, the CPU jumps to near 100%, rendering it useless. The task manager shows explorer.exe and system as being the two biggest resources of the CPU. If I close the share, the CPU doesn't let go. However, if I click on "disconnect" on that network drive, it lets go and returns to normal.I have disabled my anti virus and firewall to rule that out, but it keeps happening anyways. usually I just reboot to get back the CPU, but as I said above, last time I tried just disconnecting from the mapped drive, and that worked. What could be the issue? I never had any issues on my Windows 2000 machine accessing this same share, what could be XP's problem? I spent hours setting this machine up, but I am about ready to go back to 2000.
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Sep 18, 2006
A friend of mine's computer has three hard drives. The one designated as her C drive is an 8gb thing. She has a 40gb drive along with another 30gb one. In her cmos setup I couldn't get it to boot with a drive besides that which was designated C So can I just copy and paste all the stuff in her C drive into another drive but how would I get windows to boot off of that drive instead??? She has XP home
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Oct 30, 2006
My computer came down with a nasty virus that I didn't want to deal with anymore, all the computer would do was constantly reboot, could never get to log-in. So I bought a new HD (which I really wanted anyway ) with intentions of loading new OS on the new drive and using the old drive as a slave, and after copying all the files I needed off the old drive I was going to reformat it for storage. Everything worked out fine except on the old drive I had a separate password protected admin login named Billybob where I kept all my important work files. I also used the sharing and security function to protect Billybob from access from other users. Now I can't access the files myself. I can only access the files that were in the 'Guest' profile that wasn't password protected. When I click on or try to move the files in Billybob I get the 'access denied' message. I used the HD utility program that came with my new HD and it allowed me to actually move the files on to the new HD but the files are still protected when I try to open them. Any help on this would be REALLY appreciated as I have over a years worth of technical work stuff in Billybob that I will never be able to replace.
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Sep 7, 2007
I just bought a new hard drive today (120 GB Fujistsu) for my laptop computer. I installed it, and I am now trying to boot Windows XP onto it with the CD-ROM. But for some reason, the CD is not booting up and my computer keeps saying "Operating System Not Found." I tried changing the boot order from the hard drive to the CD-Drive, but that didn't help either.
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Sep 26, 2005
I need to reinstall the OS on the hard drive, but I have to try and get some files off of it first or can I install new OS over the old one without a loss of my files?
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Feb 15, 2005
On my first attempt to boot, the hard drive is not detecte On the second attempt, the bios always sees the hard drive and boot up is normal.I have tested the Seagate hard drive with the Seagate hard drive support tool and all is error free.This is consistent. I can't find anything in the bios where this would be switchable.
Boot up order is:1. DVD drive 2. Floppy drive 3. Hard drive Sony Vaio PCV-RZ22G.Windows XP Home. P4-2.4 1 gig ram.
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Nov 28, 2006
I have two HDs installed on my comp. The master (C drive) is running WinXP home edition. The slave (E drive) was taken from my old comp which ran under Win ME (which should still be installed on it). I need to boot up with ME as a "work around" to print some files using a RIP program that is not supported by XP.Is it possible to boot from the slave HD? I looked under the setup options accessed by hitting f12 key during start up, and the "E" drive did not show up on the list of drives. Floppy, Cd drives, and a USB external drive did show up. I also tried looking under a menu accessed by hitting the f2 key...and a second hard drive showed up in that menu, but the options I had available were "off" (the setting I found it set at) or "auto", I changed it to "auto" and tried to reboot but it said "no loader_"
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Sep 17, 2007
I have a Compaq SR-1200NX system that came with a 40gb drive. It was too small for all my music and apps so I installed a second drive which I then started using for files.So Drive 1 was 40 gb and Drive 2 was 80GB..I was running out of space again so I used a drive cloner to move the 40 GB drive to a 200GB Drive.Disk Management shows different according to it Drive 0 is the 80gb drive and is assigned a letter of D and Drive 1 is the 200GB drive assigned a letter of C.Both C and D have a Windows directory off of and a Program Files but the Program Files on C has more entries than the one on D.
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Aug 3, 2005
Manufacturers get preinstalled WindowsXP on their harddrives? How does one build a similar environment on a blank harddrive? I've looked everywhere for some discussion about this, but can't find anything useful. I've read about WinPE and Bart'sPE and so much more, but noone seems to have a summary of how one goes about initializing a hard drive to boot and start an install of WindowsXP.
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Feb 22, 2007
Anyone know how to automatically boot from the hard drive? Has any one seen this before? I have been in the BIOS, set the hdd as the first device to boot from.I have looked through the BIOS but I can't find anything that jumps out as different or pertaining to this Boot Message.I looked at the boot.ini file, nothing there.I am running Win2k Pro.I don't know where else to look to disable this boot interaction..
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Dec 28, 2008
I recently purchased a used IBM Thinkpad r31 2656 with Windows XP Pro Edition installed. I do not have the system CD.This machine came with a 20 GB hard drive and I wanted to upgrade to a larger 160 GB drive. I purchased a Western Digital Scorpio EIDE drive, formatted it using Disk Management into 2 partitions, E: (140 GB) and F: (approx 20 GB) and copied the contents of the original 20GB drive using Norton Ghost onto partition E: without incident.I removed the old drive and replaced it with the new one. Upon startup, I get the IBM Thinkpad screen with the BIOS F1 and F12 messages at the bottom of the screen, and then the screen goes black with a blinking cursor in the upper left corner. This is as far as it goes.
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May 15, 2007
have tried 1.6ghz 512mb xp pro sp2 and 1.2ghz 512mb memory 256mb graphics memory xp home sp2 drive is 250gb maxtor. the situation is if i have it in my external HDD enclosure it assigns a drive letter but i get " the device is not ready" error if i attempt to access it and if i put in my main computer as a slave drive it is detected during boot but not in windows.can anyone help me i tried deleteing the driver and having windows redetect but no luck.it might be unrelated but delayed write failure keep happening on g:/$mft and g:/$bmp.
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Aug 16, 2008
My laptop, which was my dad's old office laptop, recently crashed. One day when I turned it on, a blue screen popped up and said there were a corrupt file or something. So I decided to reformat using a Windows XP cd, and for some reason it kept getting stuck on 91%, so I just left it on and it eventually hit 100% and completed.After everything was done, I turned it back and after the first Dell Screen bootup, the screen goes blank for 30 seconds, then a a line of white vertical lines show up at the bottom, looking at though something is loading, and it eventually finishes after a minute or two.Next the XP Bootup Screen comes up, and begins to load, but then the screen goes blank again.
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Dec 12, 2008
Suddenly yesterday, my laptop would not boot into Windows.. runs windows xp normally.It would also not boot into safe mode.I took the hard drive out and took it to a colleagues office to get the data off with an external hd connector.He advised that my partition table had been damaged, and the data was not accessible via normal means.Wants to charge $150.00 to get the data off. At this stage, I am wanting to make sure I get my data back, so I authorized this but I am wondering, if anyone can speak to what might have caused this to happen.I do not remember installing any programs or doing anything subject prior to this occurring..
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Oct 15, 2005
My Desktop screen seems to be booting twice. I want to check and see if that is true and if any other system programs are booting twice during initial bootup. How do I access the Master Boot List, or System Startup Menu, whatever you may call the list the OS uses to Start the system up when it boots.
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Jan 5, 2005
I have tried replacing the power supply-no change.I've tried unhooking cd-rom, floppy, replace ram & everything remains unchanged.Bios never recognizes a hard drive. I've tried several known good hard drives and the original hard drive works in another machine. It starts POST & I get HP splash then back to NO OPERATING SYSTEM FOUND, It doesn't find the CD rom drive either. What might this be related to? I've replace hard drive cable, floppy cable. The only cable I haven't replaced it the cd-rom drive.
The hard drive works as a slave in another computer. I am running virus scan and spyware on. But, why won't it work in the other computer? I'm thinking its somehow related to the bios and the fact that it cannot see the drive in the bios. I don't find anywhere in this particular bios where I can try to auto recognize the drives
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May 23, 2010
i have a dell deminsion 4550 i was given. it has a pentium 4 2. 4GHZ sounded like a good machine. nut it's not i wanted to put in a newer hard drive with xp pro just like the original and it won't boot. the original was 30GB the new is 40 (40 the max for the machine?) the origanal is from 2002 the new from 2005 both maxtor diamond max 3.5 series. there online support for sayed it wont work. i know i tried but this is wired becuse almost any other computer you can put in a hard drive and it will boot
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Sep 8, 2008
I am having a problem similar to this poster problem http://forums.techguy.org/windows-nt...cond-boot.html I made a mistake editing my second hard drive XP registry. Now it won't boot. My other hard drive will still boot (what I'm writing from) I have a backup of the registry I made in regedit.exe and I download regcool and erunt. Is there a way I can restore me second hard drives registry from another bootable hard drive?
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Jul 27, 2010
My computer automatically ran a PC tune-up and froze the screen afterwards. I cannot reboot the system ever since.
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Aug 20, 2010
I just bought a Seagate ST3400620NS SATA HDD. I want to install it as a second HDD just for storage. I currently have a ST380815AS with the OS (XP SP3) on it as the primary drive. The PC (HP DC570 SFF) boots fine with only the primary drive installed. When I add the 2nd HDD the the system recognizes that I have added a 2nd HDD. It asks me to save the settings by pressing F1. I do that. The XP boot screens displays. The blue progress bar moves once and the system reboots. I switched SATA connectors for the 2nd HDD but when I boot I get a message that I need to move the connector back to the original spot.Then I thought maybe the MOBO (Hewlett-Packard 0A64h ) only supported 1.5 gb/s. Not the case. So I am totally stumped. I checked HPs website to see if there were any updates, and there was an advisory that a different model Seagate HDD might cause a similar sounding problem but no mention of the model HDD that I own.
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Feb 11, 2007
I'm new to Linux and have been using SUse 9.2 and XP systems. Hard drive set up was as follows: Swap (502MB);C drive;Linux (4 Gig);E drive (contained XP OS). Using 37 Gig Drive, Athlon 800 mhz CPU. I used PartionMagic in Windows to set up the partitions and had BootMagic disabled and all worked well. System would boot to Grub and then from there I could go to Windows XP boot. Linux partion was my active partition. Everything ran just fine...but I wasnt using Linux often and decided to try to boot directly to XP.
I decided to make my Windows OS drive E active so that I could boot directly to Windows boot instead of Grub. But, obviously, Grub still booted first. I made the mistake, then, by enabling BootMagic in the hopes I could get to Windows directly without going through Grub. Well BootMagic hid my C:Drive which was viewable simultaneously with E:drive (which contained XP OS, another setup mistake I made when partitioning...but still worked). As a result Grub is gone and I also cannot boot to XP or Linus, even after trying to activate C:drive or activating E:drive containing my XP OS. I'm pretty sure that XP recognizes C:drive as home, even though OS is on E. I have not yet used 'fixmbr' for fear of loosing data contained in C and E partitions. I've considered using spare hard drive as a new boot drive and access files from original hard drive, save them, and then start from scratch with XP....
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