Hard disk don't boot up Help!

[~VisualPro~]

From the picture below, as you can see i have a 120 gig hard disk.
My PC does not boot up into windows Xp, it keeps on freezing showing a blackscreen with four options, e.g safe mode. When any of these options are selected the PC does nothing. Is there any way i can recover my data.

I hav to much important info, to loose can any one here help me please.

cheers.

 

[gsbtech]

Boot on your XP CD, open up the restore console, and run scandisk (or chkdsk - I get my OS's confused). How is the drive formatted and why do you think the problem is with the hard drive?

 

[~VisualPro~]

i think the hard drive is formatted 'FAT' i can't remember. It is definatly the hard drive because i went out and bought a new one and every thing is ok. I was just asking because my old hard dive has alot of important information that i need to recover.

 

[gsbtech]

It could just be a corrupted system file. The fact that you made it to the boot options screen suggests that the hard drive is recoverable if there is really a problem with it. Plug the old drive into the system that is running with the new drive. Make sure you set the jumpers to "slave" if you're on the same IDE port as another device. See if you can read the drive but double clicking. If not, use your current OS's utility to scan/check the drive. If you still can't read the drive, you man need a recovery tool. There are free tools for Fat32 but I had to purchase one to recover NTFS files.

 

[~VisualPro~]

kool, let me give it a go