Getting Stuff off a hard drive

[Pete Greaves]

Hi,
I have recently installed a new hard drive after my old version of windows xp stopped booting up (it blue screens for an instant then the pc restarts every time).  I needed more space anyway so the plan was to reinstall windows on the new hard drive then run the old one as a slave with the jumpers on the back.  All went to plan till it came to getting the stuff off the old drive... when I go to click on it in my computer, a message comes up saying "this drive is not formatted. do you want to format it now?"  The answer to this is no, as it has all my web design work and uni work and photos on it... basically all I want on it is the my documents folder.  Anyone got any ideas for how to copy this (perhaps using dos) or just get on to the old drive?

Thanks a lot,  pete

[Joleen]

So, windows can see the drive and knows it's there but when you select it you're told it needs to be formatted?  Is the broken drive making any strange noises?  What if you use the Windows backup feature and backup the broken drive or even just backup the files you want.

[Mac]

What sizes are these drives? Are they partitioned, and do they both have the same formatting, FAT32 or NTFS?

Did you try the Recovery Console (from the XP CD) and the FIXBOOT command on the old drive?