Help..Hard Drive failure

[Fireplace]

I purchased an external hard drive recently to back up my personal data. My current internal drive has a partition that I created with PartionMagic when I bought the pc some years ago.

Now I have moved the data from the partition to the external drive I decided to merge the partition back into the rest of the c: drive , again using Partition Magic.

Followed all the prompts and it began to merge after a re-start. It said it may take some time, so I went away and had dinner.

On returning to have a look, shock!!! BSOD. Now it won't boot into Windows XP or Safe Mode or any other of the options that are available.

Any suggestions, as there are no options to just get a command prompt. My most precious data is on the external drive, but all my emails, addresses etc are stranded on the inaccessible drive. I also don't have an XP disc as the rescue stuff is in another partition of the same drive.

Help...........please..........

[Aragorn]

You could download and burn an XP Live cd (I recently used http://www.ubcd4win.com/), but it does require an XP CD on disk. That might allow you to look at the contents of the disk and save to the external drive. That assumes that the partition table isn't hosed (which it probably is ).
A Linux live CD (such as SystemRescueCD) with fdisk and parted may be able to rebuild the partition table, but you would need to know how big each partition was.
Afraid it's not going to be an easy job either way.
Know anyone locally with a XP boot CD to borrow?

[Fireplace]

Thanks for the reply. I don't think I know of anyone with an original XP disc, maybe one person with an upgrade version if that is of use.

I have since found the manual that came with Partition Magic and the CD which advises to create a boot disc from files of the CD and go from there. So I am going to try this when I can find a machine that will allow me to use a floppy drive - getting a bit scarce these days.

Thanks

Originally Posted by Fireplace

I don't think I know of anyone with an original XP disc, maybe one person with an upgrade version if that is of use.

Are you saying your OS is not legal?

[daggman]

I also don't have an XP disc as the rescue stuff is in another partition of the same drive

i dont think he has a pirate copy, prob. he has a HP, Pakard bell, DELL etc type machine were they dont provide u with a xp cd, just recovery rubbish, which will only reset the machine back to factory settings.

Originally Posted by daggman

i dont think he has a pirate copy, prob. he has a HP, Pakard bell, DELL etc type machine were they dont provide u with a xp cd, just recovery rubbish, which will only reset the machine back to factory settings.

Ahhh I see - he forgot to make those recovery cd's!

[Fireplace]

Yes I have a HP machine with no recovery discs, all the recovery information is held on a partition on the same drive that I am trying to rescue.

Pirate.......perish the thought!

[TheBlueRaja]

Originally Posted by lsainsbury

Are you saying your OS is not legal?

Quick, phone the cops, get bill on the line.

Bad man, bad man.

[Hom3r]

My lappy had no recovery disc to I had to make them myself using sotware on the Lappy, that took 3 DVDs