Inaccessibe Hard Drive - Broken CD Drive
Aug 22, 2007
I have an old laptop. It was used in my parent's office, and since they got new computers I get to take the old one home. However, the use in the office took its toll and now it takes hours to open certain programs like firefox, it can't detect my home internet at all, and the cd drive is broken.
I wanted to reformat it, so without the cd drive I had to copy the contents of the OS disk to a USB flash drive to install XP from there. However, I had over 10 gigs worth of office data I wanted to back up, and without internet access or an external storage drive I wanted to make a primary partition(that can act as a backup which survives a reformat) out of available spaces of my C: using the program called Partitionmagic
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Apr 28, 2008
I have just tried to restore my laptop to factory settings using the recovery DVD. however part way through this process my DVD drive has broken and now I cannot boot from the DVD and windows will not start as it did prior to this (I am posting this from a friends computer)
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Mar 5, 2010
I have a Dell computer where one of the loading .dll files came up 'missing' one day, so it won't boot. I want to get all the photos and other docs off the hard drive. I had downloaded one version of linux and was able to see the files on the internal hard drive, but was unable to copy them to a memory stick or external hard drive. Now I've downloaded ubuntu and booted off a memory stick... this time, it's telling me that the internal hard drive has all kinds of bad sectors and won't let me access any of the files on there.
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Jan 21, 2008
I have a laptop that I just got my hands on, it's a Dell Inspiron 8200, has windows XP Pro (service pack 2) on it. I need to reformat it, however, the cd drive doesnt really work anymore (this is the second cd drive its had). I would rather not spend money on a cd drive or anything, and was wondering if there was anyway to use a boot disk to format it, then if there was any way to install network drivers and use a network to install windows. That at least is my present theory of how to go about this, but I'm not sure if it's even possible, and I'm searching around online right now.
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Aug 5, 2010
My laptop died and I removed the hard drive.i hooked the hard drive up to my new laptop via a SATA/IDE cable.
I can see the old hard drive in the E drive and it appears that all the contents are there by the size of the hard drive (same as when I had it in the old laptop) but I can only see, actually view, a very small percentage of the drive.
My goal: I want to transfer all old music, word documents and photos from old laptop into new laptop.
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Oct 13, 2009
current HD going bad, have second HD installed and using as back but now i need to make the second HD my primary, can i do this without having to reformat in order to add booting files.
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Dec 5, 2007
using XP. am having wild swings in my hard drive space go from 46.1 to 44.1 and sometimes in between. have not installed any new programs recently. what could be causing it and how do i correct also am noticing my laptop as slowed appreciablydo know whether the two problems are correlated
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Jul 2, 2008
i have a Compaq nx 7400 .i was hahving a lot of problems with the computer so i decided to put a new hard drive in and reinstall XP .
well i have the new hard drive in and started up the machine and changed the bott options to run from the dvd and all went fine until i should press the ENTER ( return ) button to install XP now . as soon as i did that the next window said no hard drive found . this was also happening on the old hard drive that was in the machine .
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Apr 1, 2010
When installing a larger main drive, how do I get the drivers copied onto the slave before I take out the main one I wonder is there a simple way of doing this, I am using Windows XP home edition, the PC is an oldish one and isn't any specific make, so I can't get any clever programs from the manufacturers site
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Aug 6, 2005
I use Cobian Backup to produce a zip-file containing all files and folders, except for temporary-folders (I added an exclude-filter), of my system.Before I can rely on this method, I need to find a way of restoring the 27 gb zip-file, which I store on a networked drive, easily. how booting up a laptop with a formatted harddrive, be able to access a network-drive and extract all the contents of the networked zip-file to the hard drive?
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Dec 20, 2008
A little over a year ago I purchased a used IBM Thinkpad laptop from ebay for my wife. It came with Windows 2000 Professional installed and everything worked fine. No CDs or floppies came with the computer. A couple of months later, it was stolen by one of her business associates. It eventually was recovered, but the thief had installed Windows XP along with the OS that was already installed. In trying to remove XP and return the machine to its original state, I somehow managed to eventually not be able to use either OS. As it stands now I have no OS and cannot even access my hard drive.When I boot from a floppy then try to change to C: drive, I get the error message: Invalid media type reading drive c: Abort, Retry, Fail?
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Oct 2, 2006
A friend gave me a laptop, my problem is that it came from Japan thus everything is japanase thus I can't hardly use it. The reason I accept it is bcoz he said I can try to reinstall a win xp with english version (btw, the OS is win xp pro in japanase version). Thus I bought win xp pro sp2 and try to reinstall it, so I reboot fm cd rom and while the windows setup is starting, the system stopped and the message on my screen read as:A problem has been detected and windows has been shutdown to prevent damage to your computer.If this is the first time you've seen this error screen, restart your computer. If this screen appears again follow these steps:Check for viruses on your computer, resume any newly installed hard drives or hard drive controllers, check your hard drive to make sure it is porperly configured and terminated. Run CHKDSK/F to check hard drive corruption. then restart computer. how in the world I can follow the above steps if everything written on it are in japanase language? I also try to visit the manufacture's website, thinking that perhaps it help solve the problem but....i also need a japanase translator to understand it.
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Jul 31, 2005
I had to reinstall XP because of spyware issues. I saved important data on my slave drive. I reinstalled XP. Now the bios, device manager, and disk manager recognizes the slave drive but didn't assign it a drive letter. In disk manager it shows as a basic disk, NTFS, Healthy (Active), 18.65 GB,Online. When I right click the volume to assign a drive letter it is grayed out.
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Jan 19, 2008
i screwed up my registry, and of all things it was the keyboard driver or something, so theres no hope of fixing it on my computer. ive got the drive hooked up as the slave on a different computer, but i cant figure out how to edit the registry on my drive rather than the primary drive. is there any editors that will open it from a file? any way of decompiling it? theres got to be some way to edit it. also, they are both xp.
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Nov 22, 2009
I have just bought and installed (to the point of completing initialization under Disk Management) a new 1 TB hard drive. Originally, I was planning to use it solely for data storage.However, I am thinking of installing Windows XP Pro and all the programs I currently use on it, thereby making it the new OS and programs drive, while using the original 120 GB HD as a data/backup drive.I think the main appeal of doing this, for me, is that it also presents an opportunity to reinstall Windows on a machine which hasn't had this done for more than three years, and which currently seems to take at least five minutes to boot to a "usable" state, despite having a reasonably high spec for its age (it was bought in 2001, but as a result of the upgrade
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Jan 6, 2005
I have 69.1 memory free from 74.5 and i noticed no matter how much i delete i cant get up into the 70s.For example this month i have deleted a ton of music files that came up to about 400mb,Then a few programs that were around 50mb each and still nothing .If anything it seems i am going down in memory instead of gaining from deleting these programs.
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Oct 13, 2008
I had this idea, see if anybody has an opinion about this. My wife has an old XP computer I want to buy her a new one but she doesn't like the vista and she wants to keep the old xp operating system. What I want to do is take the old hard drive and put it in the new computer as the master and take the new hard drive and put it in as the slave erasing the vista off it. Then using the master slave way can I transfer the xp operating system and all her files and data from the old hard drive to the new one.
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Oct 7, 2010
We have Windows XP Home Edition 80 GBCan we copy entire hard drive to an external hard drive?
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Oct 5, 2006
Can anyone tell me whats the difference between a ATA hard drive and a SATA hard drive?
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May 17, 2007
I've connected an external USB drive, but when I go to My Computer it shows it as a network drive. In addition, it gives it the same name as the mapped network drive that already exists there. When I change the name of the external drive there, it then changes the name of the mapped network drive, so again they both have the same name, although the drive letters are different. Any ideas how to make the external drive appear where it belongs in My Computer, under Hard Disk drives?
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Feb 23, 2009
I turned the PC off to reboot when I though I was going into safe mode and went into regular mode instead. Now, it thinks one of my external drives is the C drive. On boot, I am getting a message that it cannot recognize find the system 32 windows config file (I'm paraphrasing).
I used the repair utility to get to the C prompt (which is pointed at the external drive) and checked the drive letters. I don't think the PC bios knows the hard drive is there.
I tried going into setup and reverting to factory installed configuration and that didn't change anything. I could not get it to recognize the hard drive.
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Sep 28, 2005
computer's running a lil bit slow and wont allow me to install my new mobile phone software as c drive memory is full, i've tried my best to move things to the d drive hard disk but its still really full.is there any safe way of transferring most of the programs and files over to the second hard drive?
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Jul 24, 2005
Is there a way to convert a partioned hard drive (c: / d for example and make it a single drive (c without losing all your folders and programs on the partioned drive. I am running out of space on the c: drive but the d: drive has some space left on it. And I want to just put them together as one drive.
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Feb 14, 2007
A while back a friend partitioned my hard drive into three different partitions. the one I use is now almost full and I would like to merge the almost-full partition with the next partition, which is completely empty. Can anyone help me with the steps to do that? Thanks in advance. I have a windows xp system with the big service pak installed also. the pc is a dell dimension 4300 with a 1.6 ghz processor and 513 mb of RAM.
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Jun 24, 2005
Correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that hard drive letters were assigned each time the machine booted up & only c & d were reserved for the operating system & CD/DVD drive & if the number of drives altered from one boot up to the next these letters could change. The reason hat I ask is that I changed an internal drive which had several partitions on it only to find that this drive isn't recognized, but even though it isn't recognized by My Computer or disk management the other partition are labeled as if this were listed.I now don't have a an 'e' & 'g' drive listed. But I do have a 'J' & 'k' listed. Where is my other drive 'e' & 'g' & how do I get to use the data on them.
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Jan 4, 2007
Hardware:
IDE drive; SATA drive; misc USB drives and card readers p4 (2G) Foxcon board (w/ SATA support); 2G Ram...
Software:
XP Pro SP2; Partition Magic 8; (& misc apps)
I bit the bullet and reformatted my hard drive after problems with a corrupted W98 partition. (My testimonial to XP is that w/ W98 I did this sometimes twice a year or more; I've run XP without having to re-format for over two years.)
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Aug 3, 2005
I have recently added a 160Gb Maxtor 6 P160PO drive in an external hi-speed USB housing connected via a 4 port USB-2 card. I have tried copying large amounts of data (13-20Gb) but after a few minutes, I get "The drive is not ready" and it disappears from My Computer. If I disconnect it and re-connect it, it will reappear. The same happended with a 20Gb drive I swapped in, so it seems that it's not the drive. I have tried a different port to no avail.
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Apr 14, 2008
My daughter's HP dv2000t notebook computer had a motherboard crash, apparently (won't turn on). I took the hard drive out and put it into a NexStar-3 USB drive enclosure to try to salvage the iTunes and documents. The folders all show up, but when I try to access her user directory, it says that it is "empty". The properties for the hard drive also say that it the drive is almost full, so the data is all there...somewhere.Is there some kind of security that is tying the user directory to my daughter's computer and dissallowing me to tread her files on another computer? I can see how this would be a good feature if it was stolen, but when I send it back to HP for repairs, they say that they will restore the hard drive to its original condition and wipe out her investment in music, etc.
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Aug 22, 2006
Windows XP home cannot find 2nd hard drive, it does not show up in disk management. It does show up in the bios.At one point it did show up, healthy formatted NTFS drive.I was able to add a fileafter that it was gone.I have one user account, and GUEST account.I checked permissions and set them all to enable.
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Nov 4, 2009
2nd drive no longer shows up in BIOS, my computer, or control panel system hardware. When I checked my C drive, in the control panel system hardware it's now listed as a SCSI hard drive, and includes a SCSI controller. How do I convert it back to a standard IDE SATA hard drive. And is this transformation is the cause of my lost 2nd drive?
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Jun 20, 2008
A friend of mine would like me to take a look at his computer for him later. He said he is getting an error message when he starts it up that says Failure to read internal drive Press F1 to reboot. He doesn't have the exact message but that's about it. Does this mean the hard drive is bad, or is there hope that I can fix this?
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