Classic British Flight Sim

My backup pc, which is in the 'safe' hands of Mrs B, has refused to boot up tonight. Perfect timing since the aforsaid lady was about to print up adgenda and minutes for a meeting taking place at 7.30! Hey Ho. At lunch time it hung up on switching off and the only answer was to manually turn it off.

First indication of something wrong is a musical - a naff mobile phone tone - from the pc as it began the boot process. Second was the black screen telling me that the 'NTLDR' was missing. I'm guessing that this is a failure on some part of the HD which is over 5 years old and well used.

What to do? Buying a replacement is the easy part - it is the rescuing of the information on the old unit that is important. Most information has been copied (2 weeks ago) to the second HD but there is still a shed load of accounts and email addresses etc.

Is there a way of getting the knackered unit to give up its files once we have a new HD set up? I'm thinking of being able to copy files?

I am not a programmer or able to do more than a few basic things - like install a new HD - so am I looking at having a professional in to do the work or - even worse is everything on that HD lost?

Any helpful suggestions would be most welcome. Meanwhile I will prepare the prayer mat and point it in the direction PC World.........

Thanks in advance




Allan

Thanks for that CB.

Allan

For what its worth I tried to reinstall ntldr and ntdetect.com but there was no way to do it since the HD was not registering.

Having used up a year's supply of rude words like bother and bum I had a brain wave. Why not sit in a corner and sob or better still grab at straws?

So in a fit of desperation I tried using an old Maxtor checking programme I had on floppy (PowerMax v4.09). It worked, after the 90 second fast diagnosis I was advised to go for the in depth scan which took over 2 hours. Faults were found on the HD and, at the risk of losing some information, PowerMax repaired the HD. Result: at 2am I was able to make back ups onto a second HD of all the important stuff.

Now, do I just replace the HD or shall we use the pc as a spares cource and buy a new machine? I could use this as an opportunity to buy my super new optimised for flight sim pc and hand over to Mrs B my old one; isn't life a difficult at times.


ATB


Allan

What is a pc optimised for flight sim?????

Got there in the end.

Installed a new HD and put the old one into a spare caddy and used it as an external drive to transfer all the essential files. Of course had to revalidate my copy of XP and being told (at 2am) that my copy was not legal slightly annoyed me.... A phone call in the cold light (it was snowing at the time!) of day soon sorted out the problem and we are now legit.

We are now back to being a 2 pc family - bliss.


Allan