hard drive problems

ok here it goes
I thought i was merely loading a driver for a cable to interface with my cell phone (i didnt get this online or anything. got it from the cell phone company). It said i needed to reboot so i did. upon reboot, it just stoped in the middle of booting up:cry never made it to windows at all? I tried rebooting some more, but to no avail

so i had an older hard drive and thought i would boot up with that so i could maybe look at the other hard drive and see what might be going on. but the old hard drive had windows 95 and the fried one was XP. But it wouldnt recognize the one not booting up, wasnt sure but thought i remembered something about the two systems used different languages or something like that.

so i got a cable to hook up to the hard drives from my new computer thru USB and when i hook it up to the unworking one i get a "file paging error"

i got some stuff i want on the hard drive. is it pretty much useless to try to get it back anymore?

 

Install windows XP on the healthy drive; it's possible though not mandatory that the "fried" drive uses a NTFS file system, which win95 will not recognize.

When you get the file paging error, do you try to boot the computer from the USB hard drive or are you booting from the drive on the comp itself and then trying to access it via USB?

 

my new computer has XP and when i use the USB cable to connect to my old hard drive i get the file paging error on that drive. my computer is fine the error is just about the defective hard drive.