My old system has two hard drives - one running Win98 and 2000 in dual-boot, the other running XP. I had specified the boot order so that the second disk booted first and XP always loaded. Until recently, when I suddenly found myself in Windows 2000 for no apparent reason.
Ever since, I can't get Windows to recognise my main (XP) drive - it shows up fine in the BIOS but no matter what I do, what boot order I specify, the other disk kicks in and Win2K loads. Then I go into Disk Management and the XP disk doesn't even show up.
When Win2K starts to load, there's a very brief flash of an error message at the top of the screen before the Windows splash screen appears - it seems to say something about an I/O error, but it's gone too quickly for me to read it.
I think my disk has died somehow, but am puzzled as to why the BIOS still thinks it's fine, even after re-running the Autodetect. Anyone got any ideas? Is my disk a dead loss? I had a lot of data on it, and only the absolutely vital stuff was backed up - everything else is just a (fairly major) pain not to have. (Ironically enough, the whole point of me booting it up that time was to copy all the data to another disk - typical!)
Ever since, I can't get Windows to recognise my main (XP) drive - it shows up fine in the BIOS but no matter what I do, what boot order I specify, the other disk kicks in and Win2K loads. Then I go into Disk Management and the XP disk doesn't even show up.
When Win2K starts to load, there's a very brief flash of an error message at the top of the screen before the Windows splash screen appears - it seems to say something about an I/O error, but it's gone too quickly for me to read it.
I think my disk has died somehow, but am puzzled as to why the BIOS still thinks it's fine, even after re-running the Autodetect. Anyone got any ideas? Is my disk a dead loss? I had a lot of data on it, and only the absolutely vital stuff was backed up - everything else is just a (fairly major) pain not to have. (Ironically enough, the whole point of me booting it up that time was to copy all the data to another disk - typical!)
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