Please Help Me Save My Data!

Hi Everybody:

I am a newbie to computer rebuilding, and etc., and I'm hoping that someone with more knowledge than me can help.

About two years ago, I purchased a Compaq Presario 5000 series. Came with a 40GB Maxtor hard drive and a one year warranty. Sure enough, a year after the warranty's gone, I started having trouble with the hard drive. The system would start, freeze, and crash (I was runing WINXP; this was shortly after XP was released). Anyway, I suspect strongly that it is plagued with viruses, as I didn't have a reliable virus program.

Long story short, now the computer won't start; I get "Unmountable boot volume" Blue screens whenever I try to start the computer. I was told to try using the XP CD to recover the disk, and I went into the Setup to change the boot order to start with the CD--but the computer skips everything I try to boot...REcovery disks, floppies, even the XP CD itself, and goes to the blue screen.

Is there a way I can save this disk without having to pay a company? Can I install another hard drive as a master drive and make the failed drive a slave to save the data since there seems to be a boot error? If all else fails, can I at least completely reformat the hard drive and start all over? I'd hate to do that...I have programs, music, pictures on that computer that I hate to lose. Please offer any advice.

First, download powermax from Maxtor, and diagnoze HDD.

Next prepare Win98bootdisk from bootdisk.com or so, in order to repair XP.

Thank you! I will try that tonight when I get back home. Do you know the website to download the Maxtor thing? (Please forgive my utter stupidity )

http://www.maxtor.com/en/support/downloads/powermax.htm

(~~;(You can use Google by any keywords, just input "powermax" or so.)

Along the way, bring back Maxblast which seems to do drive copy and installation aid.

What does the error message say?

the blue screen> is it a fatal error has occurred>>\
please insyert system disk?

hmmmm.. try this>>
open compuiter>
there will be a batter a lil one on the board take that out for about 2-10 mins then put back in>
then try use the xp disk. my guess it will format so buy a **** hard drive and install that as a master and the other slave install the operating suytem on that. get the data u want and then format the one that stuffed.
After that>
put the stuffed in the one formated fun as master and install the operating system back on it then trasnfer the dtuff bak???
l8ers

you could try putting your hdd into someone else's computer as a secondary drive, copy what information you want out of your disk into the other, and then format yours. Or buy a new hdd, install win into it and install the old one as secondary and do the process of copying and formatting

Good luck ;-)