3 OS computer, Hard Drives Corrupted, Any way to save the data?

2

I have a computer. Its a pretty amazing computer. I built it myself. It has 3 500gb hard drives in it, all with different OS's: XP, Vista, and 7.

Some how, it seems ALL 3 have gotten corrupted. one day I turned on my computer, I booted up XP. It gets to the loading screen, then BAM! a crash screen flashes on the screen (a 0x00000007 code) it automatically resets after that, so... logically, since that one stopped working, I figured I'd try getting booting Windows 7.

Windows 7 gets stuck on Startup Repair. And of course startup repair is unproductive and cannot find any problems. So I opened the command prompt and perform a disk check. It FINDS NO ERRORS! WTF right? So I try vista next and it won't even start because it says kdcom.dll is missing or corrupt.

What is really funny about all this is with Windows 7 and XP SOMETIMES it actually manages to pass the loading screens and I can use them like I normally would.

I'm pretty sure my data is safe because sometimes I can still access it. Is there anyway I could save the data, because I have like 400gb of data. After the problem started I moved all the collective data from all the hard drives onto the windows 7 hard drive, because that is the one that actually works most often.

So could I take that hard drive out and put it in one of those cases that allows you to connect it to another computer through USB, and transfer all the data there, or get a nice big external hard drive and pull the data off that way?

I realize that I'm gonna have to wipe the hard drives and reinstall windows on all of them. I just want to be able to put all my data back after doing that.

windows-7
windows-xp
windows-vista
hard-drive
backup
asked on Super User Nov 11, 2010 by Sean • edited May 7, 2014 by Jason Aller

2 Answers

3

Yes, you can use a hard drive enclosure to connect your drives to a different computer to copy your data to a new location. You can also use an Ubuntu live CD or flash drive (or other Linux distro if you prefer) to boot your computer and copy your data that way.

answered on Super User Nov 11, 2010 by Velociraptors
3

The chances of three drives failing simultaneously are very small. More likely you have a hardware failure elsewhere, perhaps in the disk controller, perhaps in memory, perhaps elsewhere on the motherboard.

I have an IDE/SATA to USB adapter I use to test drives on other computers, to migrate data etc, I would check the drives on another computer and run diagnostics on the faulty PC.

answered on Super User Nov 11, 2010 by RedGrittyBrick

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