[andrewas]

You have an NT based windows, probably 2K or XP. Whenever I get that message, I generaly just reformat. It indicates the registry is damaged, and unless you have a backup copy you are basicaly stuffed.

Of course, any competent developer would have included a transaction system (or any other database recovery mechanism, there are lots to choose from and M$ know all about them) to enable the database to be recovered if this ever happened, but you're dealing with M$ products here. &lt/rant&gt

You could have made a recovery disc which would let you fix it, but you have to do that ahead of time. Ive never bothered with it myself, but the option will be somewhere under the control panel.

What you can do is connect the harddrive to another computer. Easiest way is to plug it in place of a CDROM, and make sure you match the jumper settings, running with two masters or two slaves wont work.

Then you can run the BIOS autodetect routine.

And finaly, this machine cant be running an 9x kernel windows or MSDOS - so no win95, 98 or ME. NT, 2K or XP will be fine. Any modern Linux or BSD will be fine.

If you are stuck with a 9x windows, you can get programs to read an NTFS drive, most of which seem to work pretty well. Ill dig one up if you need it.

Of course, you may get lucky and have a FAT32 partition which will read under anything except the first release of win95, but Ive never seen this happen under FAT32.

[ 07-16-2003, 05:35 PM: Message edited by: andrewas ]