I attempted to set a restore point last night while using my computer. It froze in the middle of doing so and after a while I hit the restart button on my tower. Now when I turn on my computer the farthest I can go is to the windows loading screen and then the computer restarts itself. I have a gigantic project saveD on this computer and I need to finish it tonight for later on this week. Is there either a way to get windowS to load properly or to get the files I need off my hard drive. I tried using my roomate's computer with my HD attached to it so I could just search and pull the files off and re-format but after I plugged into his computer and turned it back on after the initial start up screen it goes black..... I am out of ideas and geek squad wantS $200 to get the 7-8 files I absolutely need. I NEED HELP!

put your hd in your roommates pc's, set it as slave, and copy the files off to his machine. That's if it's a workstation. If it's a laptop, can you boot into safe mode, and do you have your install disk?

yes i have my xp disc. how would I set my hd as slave

open your roommates case, there will be either a sata cable or an ide cable attached to his hard drive. Follow that cable, you should see a second connector on it. You don't need to necessarily mount the hd in the chassis, just don't let it rest on the motherboard. I usually just let them rest on the side of the case, or wherever the cable will reach to.

Look at the back of the existing hard drive (the one in your roomie's rig). There will be something called a jumper, which is a piece of copper wire covered by a piece of plastic, and it will be in a set of pins that look like this: ::::

The jumper will MOST LIKELY be in a vertical position, making it look like this: ::|:

That is how you set your drive to Master, slave, or cable select. Check to see what the existing hard drive is set at; you will most likely need a flashlight for that, as the writing on the hard drives can be pretty small. If it's set to cable select, set your hd jumper to cable select as well, and just pop 'er in, power the machine on, and it should see your drive as the d or e drive. Copy the folders over and you're done. If theirs is set to master, set yours to slave, and do the same.

If you are NOT comfy about cracking the case and disconnecting the power and sata/ide cables, do NOT do it. You can do irreversible damage to the motherboard by static electricity, and I recommend wearing an anti-static band, or at least grounding yourself by touching something metal BEFORE touching the hard drive. Also, obviously don't do any of this with the computer plugged in. This is a pretty simple deal, but you can completely destroy a computer very easily by dropping something onto the motherboard.

If you are NOT comfy with that, take it to GS and have them put the old hd in as a slave; I doubt they will charge you $200 for that. FWIW, hit the phone book and call a local mom and pop shop, explain your predicament nad what GS was going to charge you, and they will definitely undercut them just on general principles.

v

thank you so much, I will try this when I get home in about 10 mins. I'll post if I have any problems

I may not be on, but there are tons of sites out there to handle hd swapping.....it's not difficult, but be careful and think before you do anything. The biggest enemy is static electricity; a lot of people have cooked their power supplies using dust busters to clean out their rigs and inadvertantly either got dust in the power supply unit, or had a static discharge that melted the motherboard.

FWIW, the *zap* you get from walking across carpet and touching a doorknob is more than enough to melt a key part of a motherboard (not that there are any NON key parts), so just be careful not to destroy anything.

here's a good little guide you may want to print out first.

Install Hard Drive - A guide to installing a hard drive (IDE)

Hack Attack: How to install a hard drive - Lifehacker

If it turns out it's a sata drive (smaller, thinner cables than the IDE ones) the same principles apply. Roughly.

it turned out to be a SP2 issue with another program wasn't compatible. I couldn't see what the error was because I had restart on system failure. I figured it out over 5 hours, so now I can start my project! No matter that it's 5:00am\