Hello Tech gurus! my buddy is in a great mess, i am sorry if this kind of problem has been posted befor....but can you please help us out...this is his story:

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To cut a long story short...

I have a main computer that i use to take on assignments with me, I simply download all my image onto this comp, as and when i need to. As i have been working for about 6 days now, without being able to back anything up, i have amassed about 9,000 images.

Today, my last day, both my 120GB drives went down, I dont know as yet if it is the MB or the drives as it all went down at the same time.

Drive 1 is my boot drive and includes existing customers instructions and new customers contact details. (All this is moved onto my network when i get home).
Drive 2 contains all the images and txt files with notes of charges etc.

I have put both drives, one at a time, onto a spare comp but neither drive will boot up (both have an OS on them), windows tells me that it has closed down to protect my system and tells me to run CHKDSK. I have done this but no joy. The CMOS does detect the drives though.

And to make things even worse, i have a partition that i use for Bugs type stuff, so now i have lost all my FTP stuff and other bits of useful info.

Does anyone have any clues about what i can do to save my skin, and my wallet!!

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i hope you know the answer dear Tech buddies, he has win xp installed


regards
Tipsi

Your friend needs to put the drives into his spare computer but not just on their own - he needs to retain the original hard disk out of the spare computer and boot off of that, otherwise he won't have a valid install of Windows with the right drivers etc for that computer - that's why he gets the Windows protection error and it shuts down.

He needs to have the original configuration in the spare computer so that it's capable of loading up Windows normally. When that's checked and working OK, he needs to add the first faulty drive into the spare computer as the "slave" drive. Then he can boot up his spare PC normally using the original hard disk from that PC but he'll then be able to read files from the "slave" hard disk when he gets into Windows.

Onec he can see what's on the first "faulty" drive, he can obviously make appropriate backups of it and then swap it out for the second "faulty" drive, see what's on that and then back that one up.

If both "faulty" drives can be read OK in the spare computer, then the other system probably has a dodgy motherboard.