Hard drive booting / file recovery

[BenchMARK]

Greetings!

I have a two fold challenge with the final result being recovering files from
a disk that is currently non-bootable but can be accessed as a slave drive.

The desktop is a Compaq 6027US and out of the blue (according to a friend)
it would not boot up properly. The Compaq and XP splashes would come up and then there would be a click and the whole boot cycle starts up again.

Current state of the desktop is running fine with a new hard drive that has been formatted using the restore disks that came with the computer.


Challenge 1: How can I make this drive bootable again WITHOUT reformatting? (OR Can I somehow clone this drive to another one and boot from that?)

The reason I stipulate no reformatting is because that would completely wipe
out any chance of meeting Challenge 2.


Challenge 2: Some sentimentally important picture and teaching files are not
to be found on the drive. I thought that a system restore to an earlier date
would take care of that.


Thank you for your suggestions. I look forward to making this happen!!!!!

-Mark

[SYL\X/3K]

Firstly welcome to Tech Forums

Now to your situation, Do you have your Windows xp cd ? If so put here in one of the Virtual drives and boot off that by setting the boot priority to CD-Rom drive.
Now that it has loaded the XP- CD choose the repair option. Now a console will pop up, in the console Type "chkdsk /r" then enter. When done type "exit" and hit enter. This will replace any corrupted boot files after its finished.

If it still doesn't help i would start testing the hardware of the computer

[BenchMARK]

Hi Sylwek,

Thanks for the tip. I will try it out and post back how things turned out.

-Mark
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Firstly welcome to Tech Forums

Now to your situation, Do you have your Windows xp cd ? If so put here
in one of the Virtual drives and boot off that by setting the boot
priority to CD-Rom drive.
Now that it has loaded the XP- CD choose the repair option. Now a
console will pop up, in the console Type "chkdsk /r" then enter. When done
type "exit" and hit enter. This will replace any corrupted boot files
after its finished.