Windows XP repair on slave drive

[rustedhalo]

OK so after beeing directed to Seagates Disk Tools and running results are in and file system is corrupt. So I should Repair install XP. Well every time I try and do this it wants to install on my primary hard drive. I've Googled all over the place and no help. So just how would you go about running a repair install of XP on a slave hard drive?? My main concern here is to save the files on the hard drive and since the hard drive itself has no problems other then the corrupt XP no worries about a bad drive. I tried to back them up but when I open folders on said drive I get error messages and fear of losing data keeps me from going further. I have a hard drive that has XP SP1 succesfully installed on it as well as a XP Pro bootable CD. Any help would be much appreciated.

[Paul Komski]

To install onto the slave drive and write nothing to the current master you must either change the boot order from HD0 to HD1 (if your BIOS supports this) or reverse the drives temporarily (taking care with the jumpers) so that master becomes slave and vice versa.

If you want a repair installation and not just a new installation It will of course want to Repair the installation on the current master - that is why it is called a repair - and involves rewriting much of the partition.

I think what you now want to do is to install a new or parallel installation to be able to access your current files. I hope I have understood things correctly. A parallel installation can also be done into the current partition but you must not delete it first and you must install into a new Windows folder that you might name Windows2; ie you can have a dual boot into the same partition. Using a separate partition or drive is obviously safer.

[rustedhalo]

OK so yeah, what you're saying make's sence. Create a NEW coppy of XP on the hard drive that's giving me problems just like a dual boot OS. This would keep all my files intact but I'm unshure if this will fix my problem with the error messages when trying to access files. The reason I initially installed the second hard drive was to be able to see the hard drive that has the bas XP and access my files. When I boot from the CD and try to Repair windows with the 'bad drive' it freezes up after the reboot and hangs on the Setup is beeing restarted.... screen. I'm not a big Windows fan as I mostly use Macintosh based computers and all I can compare what I want to do is to when I installed a new hard drive in my Mac and ran Disk Utility on it and repaired it and installed OS 9 on it. I will give the dual boot a shot but I really would like to just fix the current version. Thanks for your help.

[Paul Komski]

Since it has been reported that the file system is corrupt then, if that is true, running a repair installation may indeed well fail since the file system needs repairing rather than the installation files. Sometimes chkdsk can repair a damaged file system on a partition; sometimes not; but of course you need to first be able to access the partition to try out such a procedure and to check that your data files are easily recoverable. If the file system is FAT and not NTFS you could also try running scandisk from a boot floppy though anything (scandisk included) that can write to the drive can, paradoxically maybe, make the situration worse.

Since you have a second hard drive the safest approach (if your data is very important) is a new install onto this drive and then either directly access your data on the other drive (hopefully) or to run recovery software on it from the new installation. Once your data is safe you can then experiment with the bad installation to your heart's content. Such experimentation could include writing a new disk signature the mbr of the bad drive by using fdisk /mbr from a boot floppy (not fixmbr from a WinXP recovery console).