Greetings! Trying to make a long story short, I'm on an HP Desktop (Pavilion a6750y). The turkey at Best Buy that sold it to me said it would be easy to install XP on. It wasn't. $800+ and three part replacements later, Geek Squad gave me a fully functional frankenstein computer with Windows XP Pro. It has a non standard video card, sound card, and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 hard drive.
Here we are several years later and living in a different state. I installed a game that locked up my computer. Restarted and got the blue screen of death. Many attempts to restart, could not even get to the login screen. Diagnostics revealed a BIOHD-8 and BIOHD-5, so I knew my hard drive was having issues and possibly going out. Last known configuration did absolutely nothing. I was able to put the hard drive in an external drive shell and connect to my laptop, but can't move the files I need because of "permissions issues". Stupid login!!
Unable to get the files I NEED to get (Application data!), I let my laptop (with Windows 7) scan for bad sectors and attempt to recover/repair. Also did full sweep for virus and malware, which came up clean. I put the drive back into my desktop and tried again. First attempt made it to the loginscreen!, but it crashed shortly thereafter. Multiple attempts didn't get that far and continued to end in the blue screen of death.
Okay, plan B. I do not have a recovery disk, but I do have the Windows XP install disk. Attempted to setup XP through the bootdisk. It found the previous installation and started reinstalling the necessary files. I was SO hopeful! Sadly, the result is now a black screen that simply says "Error loading operating system". The BIOHD-8 and 5 are gone, replaced by a BIOHD-3. BIOS recognizes the drive with the same name it's had all along. However, Windows can't seem to find it - at all.
I can NOT format or reinstall. There has to be a way into this messed up system. Any and all suggestions welcome. Please HELP!
To prevent double work, here are some other things I have double-checked or tried already:
- Emergeny boot disk with very basic boot.ini/NTLDR
- BIOS Stata mode is set to IDE
- Tried different Sata ports
- Recovery Command Prompt - nothing works because it isn't registering the drive.
So, why can BIOS see the drive, but Windows can't? How do I make it see the drive? Please help!!