First and foremost i'd like to say hello to this site. Seems like alot of good information flowing through these boards, so i'm hoping I made the right choice.

I'm having a hard drive issue and i'm a bit stuck on where to go with this. The hard drive that I have is a Maxtor 60gb. Now when I go to load it on the primary, the screen reads "windows cannot load because a file is missing or corrupt...." Now i've removed this hard drive from the computer it was in, and plugged this damaged drive into my own computer. Now when I go to plug the drive into the secondary, my computer will not load past the first screen. It seems to just stall. The drive light stays lit solid, and that's about it. All the pins are pushed in tightly, and all the wires are in the correct slots, but nothing.

I want to know what I can do to get into this drive through my computer so I can back the drive up and reboot with a recovery disk.

I was thinking about letting my computer boot up on its own, and then plugging the drive into itafter its loaded, but that's seems to pose a problem because I do not want to further damage these drives while the electricity is still flowing.

All help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

"... and then plugging the drive into itafter its loaded, but that's seems to pose a problem because I do not want to further damage these drives while the electricity is still flowing. "

Never do the above.

Check the disk jumper settings. It sounds as though you may have both drives set to master on the same IDE channel.

Originally Posted by Dan Penny

"... and then plugging the drive into itafter its loaded, but that's seems to pose a problem because I do not want to further damage these drives while the electricity is still flowing. "

Never do the above.

Check the disk jumper settings. It sounds as though you may have both drives set to master on the same IDE channel.

Stroke of genius. I had the damaged drive set as the master. Switched it over to the slave and I have complete access to the damaged drive. Perfect.

I wanted to retrieve what I could as far as important documents go, which i've backed up already onto a CD-R. Now i'm trying to reboot this drive so it can stand alone on its own.

Now is there a way to correct this error message? It reads, "windows cannot load because files are missing and/or corrupt..." "something about "windows/system32/configuration..." Not exactly in that order but that was the gist of it. I tested this drive alone, and again, it will not boot on its own, and always read this type of message.

Side note: When I switched over from Master to slave, there was about a 15 minute CHKDISK of some sort and it replaced and deleted alot of files. Don't know exactly what they were, but I have a good feeling that that's why this drive will not boot on its own.

If there is no way around this, is it still possible to reinstall windows with a recovery type cd? Or should we trash this drive completely and go for a newer one?

Thank you so much for all your help. It is very much appreciated.

This thought just hit me.

Since the drive has damaged folders, is it possible to copy the I386 folder from my working version of XP onto the damaged drive? Would that boot this drive up properly?

Just a thought.

"Side note: When I switched over from Master to slave, there was about a 15 minute CHKDISK of some sort and it replaced and deleted alot of files. Don't know exactly what they were, but I have a good feeling that that's why this drive will not boot on its own."

So it probably copied files from the working O/S onto that "faulty" drive. Is that drive the same O/S version etc? Hopefully so.

As a next step, I suggest you test the "faulty" disk with the manufacturers disk test utilities to ensure its integrity and stability.

Hard Disk Analysis Tools - Major manufacturers

"Since the drive has damaged folders, is it possible to copy the I386 folder from my working version of XP onto the damaged drive? Would that boot this drive up properly?"

As stated, it would be a good idea as long as both drive O/S's and versions are the same.

However, test the disk first.

Yea the two drives have the same O/S.

Unfortunately i've tested the damaged drive with Maxtor's Powermax 4.23, and Seagates DOS program, and after running full scans with both programs, it comes up with "the drive has failed" messages.

It proceeded then to give me a diagnostic code, which I tried to look up online, but to no avail. I think i'm coming to the end of the road with this drive but if so, at least I know it wasn't savable.

Production date was 12 August 2002. So I guess 5 years really is the life span of these drives.

Just so we can plan ahead, would you know a quality inexpensive drive in the $70-100 range? Don't want to spend a whole lot for a new drive. Surfing the internet and listening to music would be the bulk usage for this computer.

Once again, thank you for all your help.

My buddy has agreed to let me keep this drive since he has no further use for it. Since this drive is working ok in conjunction with my primary drive, can I simply use this one to store movies and downloads on?

I download many movies and its simply eating away my RAM. I figure why take it out, when there's extra space there I can use.

Possible? I'm sure people do this alot.

If you're speaking of the disk which failed the diagnostics, I wouldn't put anything on it that you don't want to loose. It could have a "hard crash" at any time.