Major XP Crisis!

[Dizzious]

So last night; my system wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary, running perfectly smoothly. I shut down; go to sleep; wake up this morning; try to boot up... and as soon as XP loads to the point where the logon screen should come up; the screen goes blank and the system grinds to a halt (no reading from any of the drives, etc).
Restarted twice with the same results; so I went into recovery console and fixbooted it; - same thing, so I tried Bootcfg /rebuild - still no changes. Running chkdsk returns no errors.

So then I pop in a nice, unscratched copy of xp pro; and tried a repair install - it gets 2/3 of the way through, and once again, all system activity ceases. I restarted and tried repair install twice more, with the same results.

So basically I'm thinking that particular install is totally 100% F***ED; but the thing is it takes me 10+ hours to get XP running the way I like it to from a fresh install - aside from the 50+ programs I'd have to install again; there are like sh*tloads of files scattered across that install that I'd need to back up (AIM logs, modified .dll files; etc etc...).

Not to mention the fact that windows isnt recognizing the 85gb partition that has all of my pictures and music on it (~10gb pics; ~60gb music) wich is completely un-backed-up. When I'm in windows setup; it recognizes that piece of the drive as being unpartitioned.

SO... anyone have any ideas on how I could fix this s.o.b. WITHOUT having to manually reinstall everything?

This will make the 3rd time this year that my hdd has crapped out on me. I think I need to buy four 500gb drives and make a quadruple redundancy raid array or something, I'm really sick and tired of having to spend days at a time recovering **** every couple of months especially when a hard drive is supposed to last YEARS.

[NotMyBest2Day]

Can you run memtest86 for long periods of time with no errors? It almost seems like probably a PSU issue. If it isn't putting out enough power, it can cause lots of weird errors, usually related to cpu/ram/chipset undervolting. That's been my experience anyway.

[Dizzious]

nah man... it was the hdd... it's toast. luckily i can at least get it rma'd though, still under warranty :)

i was able to boot up into a fresh install i made on the C partition a couple of times; it worked just long enough for me to pull all the data off of a 200gb drive i had laying around; my plan was to format then install xp and boot off the 200gb drive and back everything up onto that; luckily GetDataBack for NTFS recognized the partition that i had my music and stuff on - however the 200gb drive ended up being trashed as well (i had to use GDB to pull the data off that drive... i figured a reformat would help it, no such luck - xp and the xp installer wouldnt so much as recognize its presence).

so anyways; a friend of mine wanted me to wipe his old amd 2400+ box and put a fresh install on it... so that's what i'm on until my new hdd gets here - i ordered a 320gb w/perpendicular recording this time :D hopefully it lasts a little longer, i think i'm going to buy a 2nd one of them quite soon and set up a raid1 array though.
if these things (http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/20/conventional_hard_drive_obsoletism/) come down towards the $250 price range any time within the next six months or so; i'll probably get one and use it as my boot drive.

it'll be nice when blu-ray / hd-dvd burners hit the market and drop to reasonable prices... i'm a huge pack-rat when it comes to files. i do beleive i'm finally going to get serious about backing things up from now on.

[NotMyBest2Day]

Well that's good you were able to save everything. You got real lucky on that one. Most people don't get the opportunity to save anything at all, much less everything.

DVDs still work just fine for me as storage, though I do need to pick up a 50-pack or so of DL ones. I have a lot of Linux ISOs that I need to offload, and I should probably start backing up all of my music/movie collection, too. Movies is up over 180gb and I've been working on that collection for almost five years now. Wouldn't want to lose it all. Music is up at about 55gb and that's about four years in the making as well.

For my Linux boxes, all four of them (just four at the moment), I need to pick up a DVD±RW drive for each of them, that way they can read the DLs, too.

So, moral of this thread…back up your data regularly.

[PimpMySystem]

happy to hear your precious data has been saved most people dont succeed in that, stand alone have te opertunity like NMB2D said. If i was in your situation i would have paniced most likely :)