I just realized that I took the mounts off the hard drive, does that matter I used them for something else and the hard drive is just sitting in an open bay? is that alright?

I am not sure. Most of the regulars are in England so their day starts as mine ends.

Perhaps madmikejt12 or brain_damage will have an idea.

Originally Posted by PlatinumMoto

I just realized that I took the mounts off the hard drive, does that matter I used them for something else and the hard drive is just sitting in an open bay? is that alright?

It should not be a problem.

alright, well I thank you for all your help so far I hope I can fix it without formating I have so many tv shows and movies and I've been trying to copy them all to dvds to free up space and this happens The program I opened that caused the crash was a file spanner so I could span files across a dvd.

hah. ironic.

Thanks for the thanks!

What is this program? Can you provide a link to it?

Only speculating but if the file system was altered in any way it might be significant.

I still remember with your XP CD inserted that the Disk Management was seeing the 200 E: as CDFS and not NTFS which it should be.

OK ... in review that was your XP CD being detected and not the hard drive.

Sorry for the confusion ... must be getting late.

I've got good news and bad news. I did what you said and it said error loading os not good.

Good news I got xp to recognize the disk finally.

Bad news it's unformatted and unallocated I lost everything.

The program I was trying to open was Roxio easy media creator or something.

here: http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/177...unter10tc6.png

is it possible to lose everything like that or is there a chance there's still stuff there? how could this happen?

So with the 200 installed as Primary Master and the 20 removed then booting the XP CD and Entering Setup what happened?

Is this a retail Microsoft XP CD?

Hard drive data is always recoverable depending on what it is worth to you. Assuming that the hard drive is not physically damaged.

Many links here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...drive+recovery

well I have two xp cds one of which is the barebone when it first came out retail cd no patches or updates I used this cd to create a slipstream cd with all the updates and patches for sp2 up until that time.

It asked me if I wanted to repair using recovery console I said no it asked me if I wanted to install windows I said yes enter and then it said do I want to format and I hit f3 to quit and hit f3 to quit.

then after I hooked up the 20 again as the primary master and the 200 as the primary slave I started xp and then it said generic volume found.

I had 117GB of stuff on there some of it was for school and tons of other stuff.

what if I do a system restore? back to before I opened Roxio would tha thelp?