Searching old Hard Drive

[newbienthehouse]

I have this computer from which I took various parts from other broken down computers and made this piece of crap. However it works and is better than nothing. Right now I have an old Western Digital hd around 10 GB. I have another Western Digital hd around the same size from which I would like to search it. However, the latter Western Digital is known to be corrupt. Is there any way I can search this hd without causing Microsoft XP to crash?
Here's a little info: 4.5 X 100 MHz AMD proccessor, 192 MB RAM, CD-Rom and HD running as primary devices, graphics card, sound card, and a wireless internet card.
Thanks for any help.

 

[FadingTheory]

MS-DOS disk. Try that.

Unless its NTFS... dont know what to do then.

 

[newbienthehouse]

can you guys speak in lamens terms, I can't speak no computer talk.

 

[uzi9mm]

Disconnect the old drive, connect the drive you want to search thru.

Download any DOS bootdisk
http://www.bootdisk.com/bootdisk.htm

Put that in your computer before you start it up. It should come up a black screen with white text.

Type in: cd C:\

hit enter

That will take you to the beginning of the drive..... After that type in:dir
hit enter

it will give you a list of all folders/files in the C:

If you want to go into a specific folder type in the C:, for example C:\windows

when you in the main part of C:\, type in cd windows
hit enter


Also if you use the "dir" command, the list of folder might be too long to fit on one page, so when you use the dir command somethimes you might have to pause/break the list on the keyboard. The button is by the "num lock light"

 

[Harper]

However, the latter Western Digital is known to be corrupt.

I don't like the WD drives. They have this habit of just corrupting or loosing data for no reason when they get around about 3+ years old. I would not be storing any thing valuable on that drive.