Hey AO'ers
I am really hopeing that someone here can hlp me out!
I am only so-so at best with computer repairs so bear with me.
I was ask to look at a michine that would not boot.
The OS was XP home running on a P4
I could not get it to boot normal or into safe mode. Booting normal it would make it to the windows screen for a second, and the start the boot proccess over. Booting into safe mode it would just hang at MUP.sys Wether i was right or wrong i don't know, but i assumed it had a bad boot sector.
Rather than breaking out the live cd and backing everythig up i decided to just but a new hard drive and reinstall winXP, then hood the old HD up as slave to transfer files.
After a fresh install (winXP pro sp3) i shut down a installed the old hard drive.
The drive shows up, properties shows NTFS but appears to be raw (0 bytes used 0 bytes free)
I then tried to scandisk the drive several times, but it stops responding after a very short time.
Next step was to try paragon. It showed approx 75 gig used and 78 gig free (seems about right) but paragon could not access the drive either saying invalid format.
There is not much on the drive that i NEED to back up but there are some pictures that the owner really really wants to save.
Any help or advice would be wonderful

