blue screen of death

This is my nightmare : My Dimension 3000, XP Home has served me with the start error unmountable boot drive. Unfortunately, my backup was fried a couple of months ago and I have not backed anything up since. (yes, lesson learned)
I have three partitions: two are very small in size and FAT, the other is huge unknown. According to setup, I have about 1700 MB used out of 80 GB.

This is what I have done to try to retrieve my data: *In Recovery, ran Chkdsk and /f /r, got to 25% and stopped. *fixboot...to damaged *Ran Dell Diagnostics: In ISD DISK s/n (Only in read mode), I was given error code 0F00:0244 beginning with message block 157912 through......?? I didn't hang around that long. All other functions of Blue Screen testing were kosher. *tried a repair install with both XP Home and Pro, tried a smaller partition and it can not identify an operating system and wants to format. *Tried this in recovery: COPY X:\i386\NTLDR C: & COPY X:\i386\NTDETECT.COM C: and it said that that wasn't something that I could do. *Reset my BIOS *Bought a new hard drive and installed XP Pro. Hooked up the old drive as a slave and can not access anything but six unknown files. *It will not start even in safe mode.
I am at my wits end trying to access this data. I would rather not take this to a lab and spend a small fortune. Does anyone out there have any other ideas?

 

soundz like that h drive has go bye bye..i saw a program on the net (forgot where) but it sorts currpet files out

 

I'm not sure what programs MG has to offer but I've had personal success with both PC File Inspector and Spin-Rite.

http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
http://www.grc.com/spinrite.htm

It definately sounds like that drive is on its last legs. I hope you're able to recover your data.

 

Thanks, but I found a program that did the trick. This is one amazing program. I still can't believe that I got this stuff on my new hard drive. Check it out.

http://www.runtime.org/faq_gdb.htm

Thanks again.

 

Awesome, good to hear you were able to save your data.