What the hell? No drive C!

**tyuun** · September 11th, 2004, 06:02 PM

Alright my comp just shut down on me about 5 months ago and I tryed to fix it with no success so now I turn to you. Windows XP won't load at all it just keeps bringing up an error message something like "The computer was improperly shut down.... open in safe mode, open in regular mode..." OK. So I try opening it in all these modes and still it reboots and gives me the same black screen with this message. I haves loads of stuff on this computer I want, music I've made, pictures, videos, ect. I try hooking it up to another hard drive so I can at least get the data off of this drive but when I hook it up I can only access the D: drive (which used to be label recovery) but now, and I have no idea why, the D: drive is showing up as the C: drive and all the stuff on the original C: drive is missing. I can get into the menu through DOS but none of that stuff makes much sense to me. But still even if I open my computer in DOS what was originally the D: drive is now the C: drive and all the old C: drive stuff is gone! I have no idea what to do and I could really use somebody... anybody's help. People have told me to try using system restore but I can't get into windows to do that because all that information is missing. One night my computer was acting strange and froze so I turned it off using the power button (ya know you hold the button on the comp down and it will shut off) and when I turned it back on this black screen was there. Ok so now you know! Somebody please help me I know I'm not the only one with this problem.

**freddy** · September 11th, 2004, 06:14 PM

Originally Posted by tyuun

Alright my comp just shut down on me about 5 months ago and I tryed to fix it with no success so now I turn to you. Windows XP won't load at all it just keeps bringing up an error message something like "The computer was improperly shut down.... open in safe mode, open in regular mode..." OK. So I try opening it in all these modes and still it reboots and gives me the same black screen with this message. I haves loads of stuff on this computer I want, music I've made, pictures, videos, ect. I try hooking it up to another hard drive so I can at least get the data off of this drive but when I hook it up I can only access the D: drive (which used to be label recovery) but now, and I have no idea why, the D: drive is showing up as the C: drive and all the stuff on the original C: drive is missing. I can get into the menu through DOS but none of that stuff makes much sense to me. But still even if I open my computer in DOS what was originally the D: drive is now the C: drive and all the old C: drive stuff is gone! I have no idea what to do and I could really use somebody... anybody's help. People have told me to try using system restore but I can't get into windows to do that because all that information is missing. One night my computer was acting strange and froze so I turned it off using the power button (ya know you hold the button on the comp down and it will shut off) and when I turned it back on this black screen was there. Ok so now you know! Somebody please help me I know I'm not the only one with this problem.

if your drive is formatted in NTFS you are not going to see it in dos ,,when u plug the drive into snother machine , and try to access the drive , is it a xp/2k machine or just a win98 box?

**Garak** · September 11th, 2004, 07:23 PM

If booting through dos and wanting to view a NTFS formatted hard drive, you will need an application that will mount and NTFS partition NTFS4DOS is what I use, unfortunatly if I remember correctly this is commercial ware. Best off google searching to see if there is any freeware / shareware software you can use that will allow you to access the data. As for the original problem, if you can do a full scandisk / NDD of the drive.

As Freddy said, what OS is installed on the other PC, and what do you mean by you just get a black screen? Do you mean the spare PC no longer POST's?

**tyuun** · September 12th, 2004, 09:32 AM

The spare machine is windows ME and the one that's screwed it XP. When I say black screen I mean it's a black screen with writting "The computer was shut off improperly... start in safe mode..." thats the black screen I'm talking about. But what you saying is perhaps if I had another computer with XP I might be able to recover the lost data because it can't be seen without a computer with NTFS. I will try that and see if it works.

**Tekboy** · September 12th, 2004, 12:42 PM

I assume you are handling this drive moving it from machine to machine.

Just remember to take antistatic precautions with the hard drive, or you will be putting your data at further risk.

I agree with Garak....you should be able to see the data just fine with another NTFS machine.

Please let us know how it works out for you.

**tyuun** · September 13th, 2004, 06:13 PM

Well after upwards of 6 months it seems I'm back and ready to go. I formatted a new hard drive with XP and hooked up the old "trashed" HD to it and... oh my god, there everything was!! I am very pleased and I have to thank you guys for all your help! Thanks again!

**Garak** · September 14th, 2004, 02:06 AM

Originally Posted by tyuun

Well after upwards of 6 months it seems I'm back and ready to go. I formatted a new hard drive with XP and hooked up the old "trashed" HD to it and... oh my god, there everything was!! I am very pleased and I have to thank you guys for all your help! Thanks again!

Not a problem, good luck with your new drive and if possible, back up important data