Hey all,

I get to work this fine Monday morning and I am approached by our "Information Manager."
Her computer won't boot. XP Pro tells us to insert the original XP CD and run repair mode to fix a damaged file. I reboot in hopes that it was a fluke and get the same error with a different file.

I then run IBM's Drive Fitness Tool (it's an IBM machine) and it gives me a "Disposition Code" and now IBM is sending me a new hard drive.

Now to try and recover the files - hmmm....

In the good old days of FAT filesystems one could simply pull the drive from the original machine and add it as a second drive to a working maching and browse and copy the files over. This is the first time I have actually had a hard drive fail on me with a NTFS filesystem and I didn't think it would be that easy... and it appears that my thoughts were correct.

The working machine (from which I am now typing) detects the hard drive correctly and boot fine. The first time I booted, XP ran a scan because it detected problems with the drive. (Errors all over the drive.) I then shut down without doing anything (the IBM guy was on the phone insisting that I run DFT). I ran DFT and got the code for him fine and dandy. On the next boot XP loaded as usual but no extra drive was listed in 'My Computer'. I then go into computer management, Click on Disk Management and it asks me to initialize the drive. I cancelled that and saw that the drive was there. It has a Yeild type of icon in it. It says "Unknown" where the first dive says "basic", the full size of the drive and then "Not Initialized". The drive space shows up as being Unallocated.

I am at a loss right now as to where to go. Buying a piece of software will be a hard sell (but not necessairly impossible). I have a Knoppix distro from about a year ago at home that I can play with but as I am more or less Linux illiterate I have no idea where to go with it.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what I can do? I have spare hard drives and such around so I can clone this bad drive to another but I think I would still be in the same boat as I am now.

Thanks for any ideas!

Rene

P.S. As she is the "Information Manager" she had quite a bit of 'Information' on her computer... she's kind of upset.