How can I access my hard drive from another source?

Question

To make a long story short, I accidentally deleted my NTLDR file off of my computer, which boots the computer, so now my computer wont turn on. Is there a way I can access the hard drive to save my files?

This computeris running Windows Xp

Answer 1

yes you can take that hard drive out and put it into another computer or use an external shell with plug and play. put you HD in the shell and attach it to another computer. if you don't want to do that you can still probably use your computer but i need more info about the how far you start up go's. also the make and model of your computer will help. LT or DT?

Answer 2

Yes, there are several ways to do this, I will give you two:
1. Go to Knopper.net and get free Knopix, a live CD that will help you. Once you get the live Cd, for free, mount an external USB hard drive, drag and drop all your files from old cd to external hard drive.
2. Take the old hard drive out of your computer, and install it in another computer with the old hard drive as a slave. You should not have trouble reading the files. Again, drag and drop your files to the other hard drive.

Answer 3

NTLDR is a sort of program that runs on a special Master Boot Record on the harddrive. It handles the booting up of the computer... if you have different partitions with OSs installed, you can set it to let you choose which to boot off.

You can access your harddrive easily with a Linux Boot CD. Boot CDs also can reinstall a bootloader program to your MBR. Probably INSERT is the most versatile choice, but I would probably use the easier and better looking SLAX.

INSERT:
http://www.inside-security.de/insert_en.html

SLAX:
http://www.slax.org/

Personally, i change around my bootloader all the time because I am often switching Linux distros. If you want to stick with Windows, I would recommend first backing up your data on CDs/DVDs/USB from SLAX for safe keeping, then using the original System CDs for your computer... I believe my DELL one has an option to reinstall the BootLoader. Otherwise, if you can handle it, you can just install LILO from Slax and have it boot directly to your Windows partition. (From Windows I think you can also reinstall the correct bootloader... but I havn't done it myself since Windows NT4. I don't know if it's as easy from XP.)

Answer 4

Still got xp disk? put it in the drive turn on the computer holding the control key. XP will prompt boot from Floppy - Pick that one and XP will start up and prompt Rewrite or repair Pick Repair. If that don't work reboot with the floppy in and again hold the control key in the advanced bios settings change all to boot from your floppy drive save your settings and reboot with XP in the drive. again XP will as Rewrite or repair pick repair . After Xp running again change your bios settings back to boot from HDD.

Good Luck

Answer 5

hi

well a very simple way IF you have a XP cd with you just start your computer with cd-rom support to the command prompt

then on the command prompt type cd i386 and press enter
then type expand NTLDR._ C:\Windows and press enter
then try rebooting without the cd and mostprobably it'll boot up

if it doesnt reply back.........