re: won't boot correctly
Monday, November 2, 2009 at 10:26 pm
Posted by C K
(6910 messages posted)
First, if Windows was installed/recovered to your data drive, you can about kiss
some or all of your data goodbye. You don't want to format the drive and do more
damage to what may be left.
Pull the data drive and put it in a USB enclosure. There are recovery utilities
that will work on a USB drive from WIndows, but you don't want to write to that drive
while you are recovering from it. You need to have enough room on your internal
drive or have another USB drive connected to off load whatever data you can rescue
(if any at this point).
The correct way to do it, (you may or may not have the software and/or hardware to
do this), would be to have a software program that runs without Windows being booted
up at all. The program I use can off load onto a USB drive (or another internal
drive) and runs from a bootable floppy disk, or CD disc. Generally for best chances
for success, you don't want anything accessing any drives other than the recovery
software when trying rescue data.
www.atl-datarecovery.com
There are cheaper utilities and some even free, but the software from the site above
is what I use for the tough cases. If it can't do it, none of them can, and it is
free to try and see if anything can be recovered.
After you recover whatever data can be recovered, put the data drive into a USB enclosure
and format, or repartition and format it. From that point on, your main drive with
your Windows install should boot with the data drive connected. What is happening
is that you have two bootable drives and each is set to be the active boot drive.
The BIOS in some machines defaults to one of them, usually a PATA drive if the other
one is a SATA (on some motherboards), when an active bootable drive is detected.
If this doesn't work, and the BIOS is set correctly for boot order, something more
than we can help with from a forum is going on. That would sound like a hands on
project for assistance at that point IME.
[Reply or follow-up to this message]
|
