Well, That's ... Geeky

[madshutterbug]

There are three hard drives sitting in what will be the "office" (possibly darkroom) of the Studio which are problematical; some less so than the others.

All of them came out of used PC's that we acquired for Ruthie. She's over that, as I mentioned back in October she purchased herself a new PC. Or maybe it was September, doesn't matter.

The rather not so problematical drive is the one which ScanDisk, doing a surface scan to lock out bad clusters, delivers the message "... encountered a data error while reading root directory entry number 0." Right, then, as Bones would say to Kirk, "It's dead, Jim." Possibly I will be able to access it as a slave and salvage data.

The one I replaced it with, now, it delivers this message while booting: Stop: "0x00000024 (0x0019025E, 0x0EF033744, 0x0EF03339C, 0xBFF58D3C) NTFS_FILE_SYSTEM" and there's more about disabling anti-virus software (just how does one do this when one can't get the OS to run?) and such to get at the drive. It just hangs there.

While I am a geek, or a nerd, I'm not so much a tech. This one, also, I wonder will I be able to bypass the boot problem and recover data?

Then there's the one which came out of the Gateway Gift PC (the previous two were drives I purchased new). It is loaded with Win XP, and while booting hangs up with this message: NTLDR is missing

I guess I need to find out what the NTLDR is.

ETA (11/28/2005): yup, confirmed wht NTLDR is, it's what I suspected, and it looks less hopeful for that drive as anything other than a slave for data recover. Life is not boring.

Comments

[ihgreenman.livejournal.com]

Here's what I'd say:

First off, don't even bother trying to boot off of the disk. Put it as a slave on another system. You might be able to read the data you want off of the disk that way.

There are some other tricks you can try, but first, here are a few relevant questions:

Just how large is the disk? How quickly did it fail? How much space can you free up temporarily on another system? How important is the data on the disk?