thanks for the help i tried a few things.. that link ECTEch suggested did say it all, but was a bit confusing ..anyways i added another hard drive to the system and made the harddrive with the error on it the slave drive.. so i can retrieve the information off it ..what i really want to know is ..since i put the other harddrive on there is there a way to fix the error drive without having to reformatt OS win xp..on both drives the slave drive is 40 gig the added drive is only 13gig..