Old Hard drive problem

My system was working fine one day. I turned it off, then back on and got a mal.dll file missing or corrupt error can't start windows. Tried restarting a number of times and got the same response. I bought a new 250 Western digital hard drive and installed windows XP with SP2 on it. Now I can't get my info off the old drive. I made the old drive a slave and the new one the master on the same cable. XP asks me if I want to format the old drive. The new drive is not partitioned. Any suggestions?

 

Firstly I think you meant Hal.dll.

I suggest you run check disk on the old drive.

 

You're right..it is Hal.dll. Thanks for correcting. I'll try running chkdsk.

 

Okay..I ran chkdsk and it is coming up with,"file record segment ##### is unreadable. File system is NTFS. I didn't run chkdsk with the /f parameter.

 

Check disk just reports without any switches. to fix it run check disk /r (better than /f) or as the disk is separate run from windows which recognises it.

In my computer, right click the offending drive

on tools tab click check now

tick both fix boxes, click start

It should run without offering to do the check when you next boot.

 

I tried what you suggested..nothing. I then tried to run a property description and it shows nothing on the disk. I never formatted the drive. Can I go somewhere and get my information off the drive?

What else can you suggest?

 

Major Geeks has pages of partition recovery software, most is not free.

http://majorgeeks.com/google_search...f;S:http://majorgeeks.com;LP:1;FORID:11&hl=en

This one has a free introductory offer


http://pcperformancetools.com/recovermyfiles.htm