please help me!

please read this one then advise me.

ive got my work off the broken drive! yey. well i cant open it as dont have office installed but i think its ok.

so now I want to try and wipe windows then reinstall it, but leave everything on.

im booted up from the 2nd drive, so can i just delete windows directory from the 1st drive then boot up with windows disk and reinstall it?

i tried reinstalling over the old installation but it tellls me its corrupt and wont continue. i dont want to format the 1st drive as its full of stuff id really quite like to keep (games and 45gb music).

ok,

run a "chkdsk /f driveletter:" eg "chkdsk /f d:" at a cmd prompt to do a checkdisk and try to fix it.

You cant install windows over the old drive cos itll prob need a format, heres my suggestion but itll take a bit of time and make sure you have done a chkdsk 1st before you do it.

1. Move 30-35gb of your data from corrupt disk to the spare (leaving that amount of free space on the broken one).
2. The use Partition Magic to reduce the size of the existing partition by 30gb and create a new partition in the empty space (still on the 120gb).
3. Move the data from the 40gb to the new partition.
4. Repeat 1-3 until you have all of your data stored in a seperate partition on the 120gb and leave yourself say 40GB at the start of the drive (to install windoze and your games on).
5. Format and reinstall windows on the 1st partition on your 120gb.

Assuming your drive just had a small glitch then all should work ok. If your drive does the same thing again in the next few months then i would backup your data and return the drive to the manufacturer for a replacement (ive had this problem and lost gigs of data when it failed each time )

If you have any problems/questoins then install vent again and speak to me or phone me (pm me for number).

i tried chkdsk which just said the drive was corrupt and it couldnt continue or something.

i then booted up windows on the second drive and from the windows cd I installed onto the first drive which deleted the old installation as it went.

finally got it booted up from the first drive and it seems ok.

i obviously really could do with formatting this first drive but at the moment i havent the time for partioning etc. i might purchase a new hard drive when i get my loan (needed some more space anyway) then go for a clean install on that and wipe this one and see how it goes.

how long will the warranty be if this drive is fubar? i bought it from ccl maybe about year and a half ago?

oh and why isnt my comma key  working. ive checked ive got uk keyboard setup not us.

thanks anyway ill see how this goes.

ok tis a ibm deskstar i think.

any ideas on my comma key though?

its a pain in the arse restart hasnt solved it.

ok thanks for the help i spent the whole of yesterday f**king about with it.

im now at the point where im back to where i started before this happened but with a fresh installation of windows (but havent formatted).

ive got my work and can get everything else so it seems ok at the moment. but windows is still reporting corrupt files occasionally and azureus wont work anymore as it reports 'write fails flush fails' errors. which i googled and apparently can happen when there are minor errors with the disk writing the data and azureus is good and picks up on it and stops the torrent.

but abc works so ill use that for now.

ive not really the time to sort out getting it formatted

when i get my loan ill either get a new hard drive or a dvd-rw drive then format it and cross fingers it'll be ok

cheers

makes it cold, stupid.

don't they have fridges in slough

cool - ill remember that...

greg - bite my bum...