I have a problem regarding the booting of my hard drive. As the windows loading screen disappears, a blue screen appears for about a second then automatically restarts. I was not able to read the blue screen because it only takes a second.

I know that one way of solving this is to reformat the hard drive but I have files on the hard drive which I need to use as soon as possible.

Is there any way to retrieve my files in the hard drive? The files I am referring to are located at the desktop of my account.

My friend told me that I can transfer files through ms-dos but I do not know how to access ms-dos during startup and I also do not know how to transfer files in ms-dos.

I have tried connecting my hard drive to another computer but "Format this drive?" appears when clicking on the icon of the hard drive. I also tried going to safe mode but my computer stops at Mup.sys then automatically restarts again.

Hope that someone can help me.

Mj

First off if the drive is NTFS is needs to be put into another computer that runs NTFS.

For example Windows '98 does not.

Here is some info on the Mup.sys situation:

http://www.aitechsolutions.net/mupdotsysXPhang.html

What is the make and model of the computer?

Do you have the XP CD?

Are you familiar with the Recovery Console?

Also what is the make of the hard drive?

You can get a bootable diagnostic from the manufacturers web site.

Yes, the hard drive is in the NTFS format.

What do you mean by the make of the computer? The brand name?

Yes, I have the XP cd and yes, I am familiar with the recovery console. But my friend told me that if I used the recovery console, all files may be deleted, so I have not yet tried it. Is this true?

The hard drive is Seagate Barracuda 160gb 3200rpm.

Yes the brand name and model unless you built it yourself.

If another NTFS computer asks you to format it means it is not seeing the data on the drive.

In the Disk Management it probably shows as RAW.

This is usually a hard drive failure and you can purchase recovery software if this is the case.

The Recovery Console has many tools. Unless you tell it to FORMAT it will not delete any data.

Here is an overview: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314058

Here is the diagnostic tool for Seagate hard drives: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/sup...oads/seatools/

I would make the DOS boot disk from Seagate first and let it diagnose the drive.

If it passes the tests the use the Recovery Console.

The first command I would try would be:

chkdsk

fixboot

fixmbr

If all else fails you can download a data recovery program that will at least tell you if it sees your data. If it does then you need to buy the program in order to retrieve the data.

Most run @ $75 USD. Here is a Google: http://www.google.com/search?sourcei...drive+recovery