Dying (or very ill) master hard drive

A few days ago I got the dreaded Blue Screen of Death: Unmountable Boot Volume. Relying on my old and dusty DOS skills, I used my Win XP disk to boot up and ran chkdsk. One hour later my logon screen was back. I am assuming that my boot file was corrupt and got rewritten during the process. However, the sound (or noise) coming from my machine is not the same as it was -- hard to explain, but a bit louder and high-pitched.

I have two hard disks on my machine. The master is an old 20gb Quantum; the slave is a fairly new 300gb. I've got lots of programs on this machine, not to mention the fact that I've been tweaking it to meet my needs for quite a while.

I am assuming that the safest thing to do is to scrap the 20mg disk and either install Win XP on the larger one or get another disk to use solely for the operating system and such. I am also assuming that the problem is with the smaller, older hard disk that holds the operating system and not the new one. Comments on these options would be appreciated.

My main problem with reinstalling is that I've got loads of small and not so small programs I rely on. Short of going through all of them and manually note names and version numbers, is there any way of generating a list of all installed applications? I'm a translator and work from home, so my goal is to do this as quickly and safely as possible.

Thanks!

 

Check all the fans in the computer for noise so you can isolate the problem. I would suspect the older drive. One option would be to buy a new drive and use a program such as XXClone: http://www.majorgeeks.com/XXCLONE_d5534.html to clone the old drive to the new one. That should get you up and running with minimal work.

Welcome to MajorGeeks!

E

 

I guess we're pretty much in the same situation. I've considered a backup, but since I'll be doing a clean install of Win XP my feeling is that I'd be better off doing a clean install of everything else, too.

Thanks for the reply -- and good luck to both of us!

 

As far as a listing of all installed programs and versions, Belarc Advisor will generate that listing.
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Belarc_Advisor_d1385.html