this time, in the proper forum After 5 years of faithful service, my 180GB WD hard drive finally died on me; starting up initiates a continuous buzzing sound and I cannot even fully boot to Windows But this was only one of two hard drives - the second, only a few months old, should be perfectly fine So I'm wondering if there is any way to save the data on the second hard drive? Would installing the same OS on a new HD let me access my old files? I have a Windows XP Professional edition CD sitting at hand, but not a Windows Home edition - are the two compatible? Ie, if it's possible to rescue data off my second HD by installing XP Home and booting from that, then would it be possible to do the same with XP Professional? And on a related note, what would be the best way to back up my data to protect against loss of data next time? Thank you all very much in advance
The best way I could think to solve this is with a partition, format the unused space into a new partition. Load windows onto that partition, boot her up, copy the files onto the new partition, expand the new partition to cover the old partition. You have to be careful. Operating systems delete everything withing the partition they are being installed on.
You state that the 5 year old drive is NOT fully booting into Windows. Disconnect the old drive from the computer cables. Use your brand new drive as the Master-run the Windows XP disc and let it install the OS. Next, you install the system drivers when Windows asks for them. Now you can install your programs from their discs. The system should be running and able to connect to the WEB and your network. It makes no difference whether you installed XP Pro or Home at this point. The reason is that the OLD drive is going to be reconnected as Slave. Now you can copy all of your personal files to the new drive. Be sure that you take the time to make a CD or DVD backup of all of your personal data. I would have recommended an easier solution, Acronis True Image "Clone" feature, but since your old drive appears on its way out the solution I offer is a better alternative and will allow you to be sure that no corrupt files are transferred. Hope this helps get things back to normal for you Happy Holidays