My wife has a semi-dead harddrive. It will not load due to a botched windows xp repair install. However, it will attach to my computer as a D Drive and I can read the files. We've managed to install most of the programs on a new harddrive in her computer. I can then copy files to disk and put them into her programs. However, nothing is up to date. Quicken is current only to April 7th, Excel to March 31st and photos are missing after the first of this year. I've gone so far as to copy the entire contents of programs onto disks and then overright the same files on her new harddrive. Sometimes that succeeds in bringing dates closer, but never completely up to date. Where do the latest files go and is there any way to find them? Again, I cannot boot to D so even if I install, say, Quicken, on my computer's C drive, it cannot call up the files on her old drive. Any ideas? Any hope here? She needs this stuff for her job.

By the way, would the GHOST program be of any help?

Did you try using XP's version of scanreg /restore? Hitting F8 you select "Last known good configuration."

Is the harddrive really dying...or did the XP repairs you attempted to do muddy the water?

I did last known and it still wouldn't boot. The hdd is not dying, I screwed it royally.

Do you perchance have your OS on a separate partition from your data?

Or, do you have just one big disk?

one big disk, unfortunately

To beat Sylvander to it....

Got backups? :D

The best you are probably going to do ist to get what you can find.

Now one thing with Quicken are you grabbing the actual data files or the backups...it keeps both and usually in different places. So if you are grabbing her backup for Quicken then t 7th may indeed be the latest...:(

It will not load due to a botched windows xp repair install

What was botched?; could it be repaired again?

Don't know the quicken files but you could search the whole drive for *.xls to find all the excel workbooks.

PS The Ghost program would be fine - if you have a recent image to restore from.

Also:- presumably there are no System Restore Points prior to your problems starting.

Perhaps a long shot...

Is there any chance that you've used SpyBot, RegClean, or RegCleaner on this system?

If so, I'm wondering if you can restore if you've a registry backup from running one of these? I think the defaults of all three are to produce a backup. I don't know if it's just the items dealt with, or the full registry...

I told ya...a long shot...;)

If you can read the files, you should be able to get them off the drive.

Search for the name of the file on the drive let's say the D drive and see what your choices are. You shiuld be able to open the file from the D drive and then save it on the C-drive....

Please advise

when was the last time you scanned for a virus?
just a thought, but something is fishy. XP doesnt usually mess up when repaired unless something has messed with it.

I was able to hook up the hdd to my computer as a D drive. While I still couldn't boot up the drive, I was able to use win explorer to find files and put them on a CDR, then put them on the new drive in the other computer. Up to date files were the hardest. Using the method above never seemed to get the last week or last month of data, depending upon the program. I beat most of that by capturing all files contained in a program and moving them to the particular program file for the new disk. Then just answering "yes to all" to replace existing files. That seemed to get back mostly everything. Some programs had to be updated via Internet and I had to buy a new Lotus 123 '97 CD on eBay for $7.50 because one or more of the 21 floppies needed for installation (LOL) stopped reading. It was time to bury that one anyway. Thanks for all the help. We're PROBABLY ok. What a week!