moving boot drive to new HD & recovering data from corrupt HD


Hello all ? I have a two part question, which requires a bit of
background. I am running XP Pro SP2 in with an AMD Anthlon 64 3000+
processor (1800 GH) on a Gigabyte motherboard and 1 Gig of RAM. I have
been running with two IDE drives (61 Gig & 82 Gig respectively) and a WD
250 Gig SATA drive. The WD drive is divided into three partitions: the
C: (Operating System) partition; the D partition which contains other
applications; and the E partition, which contains all of my media files
(music, movies, audiobooks, etc.) and is over 150 Gigs.

Recently I experienced a problem whereby my computer would shut down
after a few hours, and on reboot I would get the message ?NTLDR is
missing; press CTRL+ALT+DEL?. I finally realized it was a heat
problem, so yesterday I took my computer in to get the power supply &
fans updated. They checked the WD hard drive and advised me that the
disk was corrupt, and needed to be replaced. It?s still under
manufacturer?s warranty, so I bought a new, identical WD 250 Gig SATA
disk and decided to move everything from the old WD to the new WD,
remove the old WD disk & send it to the manufacturer, and when I get it
back I?ll have an addition 250 Gig SATA hard drive.

After the new disk was installed, partitioned the new WD the same as
the old WD and ghosted the C: & D: partitions on the old WD with
Acronis and copied the data onto the new WD. I then changed the drive
letter for the ?other applications? partition to D on the new WD and
erased all the date that was on D from the old WD. So far it?s working
fine, and the computer is reading all of my other applications from the
new WD.

If you?ve read this far, thanks for your patience!!! Now I come two
the two questions / problems I have. They are:

1) How do I make the partition on the new WD containing the operating
system files the boot directory? I know I have to change the drive
letter for the partition to ?C? and make some changes in BIOS, but I am
not sure exactly what those steps, and their sequence, are. I?m sure
there are some very easy to use guides out there, but I?ve tried
googling, with no results.

2) When I try to access the partition on the old WD containing all of
my media files via My Computer, I get the message ?E:\ is not
accessible. The file or directory is corrupted and unreadable?. As I
had mentioned, I have about 150 Gigs of data on this partition ? is
there any way I can recover at least some of it?

Many, many thanks for your patience & support!!




--
Rob.T
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... the PHYSICAL DISK number, ... Partition and Boot Volume as well as other things. ... You should, at any one time, see ONE System Partition and ONE Boot Volume - ... for the typical two floppy drives and assigning Drive C: ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)
  • Re: Boot Problem
    ... Right mouse click the dest disk> Advanced> Edit ... but it should eventually boot to Windows. ... I see a lot of posts in here about the ability of Acronis to clone drives. ... I have managed to successfully copy by DELETING partition, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.hardware)
  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... OS on a separate partition. ... the PHYSICAL DISK number, ... You should, at any one time, see ONE System Partition and ONE Boot ... The name stuck when we added hard disk drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)
  • Re: A Dual-boot question; I thought C was always the partition with the running OS
    ... The Server 2003 will then call its partion "C:" Local Disk. ... When Server 2003 starts up, it will call itself "C:" and it will call the WinXP partition "E:", but again, who cares? ... The OS then assigns drive letters to the first primary partition recognized on each successive hard disk. ... Because they're on separate hard drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windowsxp.setup_deployment)
  • Re: Dual Boot Instructions
    ... If "drive" means a single partition or logical drive, then the negatives you've heard are very true. ... But if "drive" means a physical hard disk drive, then I'm in big trouble because I have SIX versions of Windows installed on my 1 TB Disk 1, my second HDD! ... The name stuck when we added hard disk drives, ...
    (microsoft.public.windows.vista.hardware_devices)