Right so I need a bit of help. :-D

I've recently been experiencing problems with my SATA Drive and all of a sudden it refused to boot windows entirely. I've spent many an hour of toil over trying to fix the b**tard to no avail.

[ It seems when I try to repair with the Windows Install CD it won't let me for want of an Administrator password unlike any of the passwords I've ever had, and I've lost the documentation for the drive itself, if anyone knows a solution to that then I'm all ears as well because I assume what I'm going to suggest next is far more complex. ]

Anyway what I'm proposing is that I take another drive I have from my other desktop and use that to boot windows from it on the problem computer (by hooking it up to it) and then remove any stuff I want from the problem SATA drive before reformatting it and starting it again from fresh.

However, the drive I have to hand is an IDE (or at least thats what I think) drive and despite my efforts to connect the two in the same system the SATA drive seems to always take priority and won't let me boot the healthy Windows on the IDE drive.

I've looked around and I've seen its quite a tricky process generally doing what I'm trying to do and I was basically wondering given my setup if it was worth doing or even possible so I can know what to do next because I really can't stand another minute using f**king (excuse my language) laggy net cafe computers and there is a lot of things on the drive that I want access to.

So, is it possible? Or should I just give up, crawl up into a little ball and nurse myself to sleep for the rest of my unenlightened and mundane desktop-free existance.

(P.S. The second is not a viable option)

The SATA Drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 10, 3.0 Gb

The IDE(?) Drive is a Maxtor DiamondMax 16, ATA/133

And my motherboard is a Asus A8N-E

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Thanks in advance!

Go into your computer's BIOS and change the boot order of the drives.

Rule number 1: ALWAYS have a recent backup available.

How long have you owned the SATA drive that started getting the errors?

HD's are good for maybe 4-5 years if you are heavily beating on them.

If you have not already tried the boot order in the BIOS, that is where I would start too. If you have and still can't boot, get a good backup package and create a rescue disk on a friend's computer that has the same OS you are running. Take a backup of the bad drive (to save your data, not your OS. The OS is replaceable.)


A good package is from Acronis available here:
Download backup software trial of HDD ghosting, data backup and restore software for home and home office PCs

That link is for a trial but I believe it is a full featured not-crippled trial that is good for 15 days.

Go to the Hitachi site and download DFT:
Support - Downloads and Utilities

Burn it to a CD (again, hope you have friends) and then boot the CD and and run a full (not Quick) scan on your drive. If it shows errors, time for a new HD. If that is the case, then your restore the backup you made to the new drive. You should be up and running again.

ciao,

rexb

Hello,I would do as Gandalf sugested.Enter BIOS/Ssetup and set boot order.

Once you have installed windows on the newish drive you should be able to access your old hard drive.

No need for downloading any software or programms at the moment.You have a spare HDD to get you up and running.

If you have any more problems please ask on your thread I am sure we can help.