Even a worse scenario now. In switching the hard drives around, I somehow blew away some XP startup files on MY drive. The only thing I could do was reinstall XP (wouldn't do a repair or recover) and now the original My Documents is not there. >:-( In the Documents and settings, there is a "Jay Johengen" and a "Jay Johengen.JAY" where "JAY" is the name of my computer. I'm thinking I'm ok, because the files must be under the original "Jay Johengen" directory, but Access Denied is all I get, no matter how I try to access it. Double >:-( I know the files are there somewhere, but they do not exist as far as XP or DOS are concerned. I'm trying a file recovery tool in a bit. Give my software issues all day long, but I hate hardware.

>Hi,
>
>Don't reformat it - just add it as a second drive once the new boot disk is installed (you may have to re-jumper it to be a slave). There's probably an even chance that, even though it won't boot, most of the files will be accessible.....
>
>Good luck,
>Viv
>
>>Have someones hard drive that has a problem with booting up. It was sporadically doing it, now it doesn't come up at all. They are getting a new one, but I was going to try and recover some of their data. Are there any utilities that can help with this? It's not worth sending off to have done - nothing that critical - but I would like to try. If it won't boot up, is there any way to get to the data, or at least format to drive so it can be used as a secondary?