Ok, I reformatted my hard drive less than 2 days ago. Reinstalled XP, reinstalled my software, ect.... everything was working fine, minus the fact that my CDRom decided it didn't want to read anything anymore. Ok, no worries, use the external until I get another one.
Had tried to update the drivers for it, just to be sure something hadn't gotten screwed up there, and windows had downloaded a critical update that apparently had come out earlier, after I had caught back up on all the updates before I crashed out late yesterday morning.
Rebooted..... loaded the "Windows XP Professional is starting up" screen and then nothing..... that screen won't go away.... will not actually load XP up. Since I have no access to the OS.... i can't exactly go see what the problem is..... and I cannot loose the data on this hard drive..... so I need to back it up somewhere... since I can't get into the system itself, I thought I'd go ahead and plug up my old hard drive... set it as master and set the xp one as a slave and just snag it over and burn it off and reformat again...
However, the other hard drive has ME on it.... it does aknowledge there's a second hard drive.... but it won't give it a letter, it refuses to let me assign one (at least from what I can tell at this stage) so I don't know how I'm supposed to access it to save the info on it.
Do I need to update the ME to XP in order to access the other hard drive's data to back it up or what can I do? I can use the external cd writer to upgrade, I think until I can get the new CDRom later today, but even with it.... not sure how to get the main disk working and get my information transferred to reformat it again....
someone plllleeeeeeease offer a little help? I run a business, and am NOT a hardware expert. I can put things together but as far as the workings of two hard drives goes, I've no idea.... I know enough to know how to set them to have the proper one a master and the other a slave via the jumpers but outside of that... i don't know what to do to make this work.... and even with the new CDROM.... is it safe to run a repair on XP? Can you do it without loosing your data or does it wipe things out? I can't risk loosing this crap and dummy me scratched the backup disks from when I reformatted, so I don't have what's on that drive.
