erikac

problem solved actually. the hard drive is fine. the basic problem was that my data drive is 250gb and i was trying to access that drive with the basic installation of win xp. support for hard drives over 137gb wasn't added until svpack1. so basically i was attempting to update the os with files from a hard drive that the os wouldn't have been able to properly read until after the updates were applied. in a nutshell.. a dog trying to catch it's own tail. i downloaded & applied the updates directly from the internet. thanks for your help & suggestions.

here goes.. this is lengthy post.. sorry about that...... using winxp pro...i have 3 hd's in my system, 1 for the os, 1 for programs and 1 for data. i decided to reformat drive c (the os drive) and do a clean install while leaving the other two drives in the system. didn't seem to be a big deal since i've done this before whenever the system got too buggy. on prior occasions, everything turned out fine but the install today is problematic. i checked some of the directories on the data drive, the folder names were all listed, but when i opened some of the folders, none of files that should have been in that particular folder were showing up. i had previously downloaded the xp updates and saved them to the data drive and these files were showing up in that particular folder. when i tried to install xp spk 2 (full network version) the files began to extract but then the system rebooted itself. upon reboot, it gave a message about checking the file system on the data drive and began to re-index and recover orphaned files. after that process was completed, i went back into the data drive and tried to reinstall sp2 but the system rebooted itself again. this time, it didn't go through the process of checking the file system or recovering any files on the data drive. i tried opening some of the readme text files on the data drive, but they were corrupted (the file opened but there was gibberish.. symbols rather than readable text). i tried extracting files from a zip file, but i got a message saying that the file might be corrupt or missing. any attempt to install the sp or any os updates from the data drive results in a reboot. i suspect that some if not most of the files are now corrupt. alas, i don't have a current backup for most of these data files. is there a way to recover these files? thanks. erika.