"My Documents" saved with reinstall?

[jcandrus]

The money isn't a big deal. The files I need to save are pictures that I've taken on all of my trips around the world (I'm in the military, currently stationed in Korea...been to about 7 different countries with a trip to China soon). I can't lose these pictures, they are certaintly worth more than a new hard drive would cost. I'll try the setup disk and try repair if you all think that's the safest option.

Thanks again

 

[A_Zip1]

ya i think the repair option with using the OS cd should work

 

[jcandrus]

Well, I selected the repair option when booted the cd and it sent me to the C prompt and that's it (not much of a help that xp pro). I found an old hard drive that I had thought of getting rid of because it seemed to be on the verge of failure and installed xp on it.
I put some files in the my documents folder and was thinking of testing my theory (about reinstallin xp and it saving the things in my documents).
Hopefully I'm correct and all I have to do is just reinstall windows and even though the partitions are jacked up, the fact that I already had xp on there will keep it from reformatting the hard drive (hope hope hope) and me lose everything.

 

[jcandrus]

Update on problem

Ok, here's what happened. I had tried to use the repair function off the cd and it wanted to format the whole drive which would of course defeat the whole purpose of what I wanted to do which was to save some files. Well, it's a good thing I had that spare hard drive that I had though was dead (apparently it wasnt) because I loaded xp pro on that drive and when i set up the problem drive as slave and booted the computer it did a chkdsk on the drive and fixed all the problems. Once it booted into windows off the old drive i had it saw the problem drive and i immediately transfered the files i needed over. I'm going to check to see if i can boot into the problem drive and see if my problem is completely fixed. So I guess you all can add that to your troubleshooting techniques next time somethin like this happens. Thank you to everyone with all their suggestions!