Hard Drive - strange behavior - what is going on???

[shannanl]

I have a serial hard drive that appeared to be going bad. The computer would take forever to boot up, etc. I changed the ram and checked everything out. I put a new serial drive in and reformatted and reinstalled XP. The computer not behaves as it should.

The problem comes when I placed the old hard drive in the computer to try to get a user's documents off from it. The old drive is recognized and I can access it but the user's profile is gone!!!! I know it was there when the computer was shut down to reinstall the new drive. All the other profiles in Documents and Settings are there.

If I had not witnessed this myself I would have dismissed it but I know the profile was there.

Anybody have any suggestions on what is going on? I ran chkdsk and it did not find any problems with the old drive.

Thanks in advance,

Shannan

 

[tbreds]

Sounds like a sick hard drive. I would trash it after I copied ALL the data off of it. If you have a lot of data it will be time consuming to get everything. For my PC backups, I use Sampsoft's PC Backup

http://www.stompsoft.com/pc-backup.html.

It is actually cheap enough for personal use, and I always find that it is much faster than copying everything by hand. Overall, I'm pretty pleased with it.

 

[Santei]

Shannanl, it's obvious that you should backup all data from your hard drive before it's finally dead.

 

[shannanl]

Santei,

Yes you are correct. This is actually my wife's computer but I should have done a better job of stressing to her the importance of backups.

Thanks,

Shannan