mikedodson

sorry I can't offer help, I'm looking for help on a similar problem. Running XP home, I was trying to save data from a dying hard drive. I added new hard drive to the system and installed windows to it. The new drive was recognized as E:. Access to the old drive was still not possible. It was there but any attempt to read from it failed- a hardware error. After sending the bad drive out for data recovery, the system still recognized the now only HD as E:. I added another drive to the system, and it shows in the bios and device manager but not in my computer. How can I get windows to show the new drive and is it possible to rename the primary drive as C:? Will that break all installed software that thinks its located on E:?

heat, heat and heat. Is the power supply fan running? is the processor fan running? Is the heat sink mounted properly? Does your bios monitor system heat, check it. A flakey motherboard or hard drive are possibleties but even there, over heating probably accounts for the cycling. Come to think of it, the last two times I had this sort of problem it was the hard drive. HDD Heatth (freeware) might help locate the problem if its the HD. I think there are some temperature monitoring programs out there but I don't know them by name. On the chance it is the hard drive be very religous about back-ups. Right now I am paying more than the price of a new system to retrieve data from my sister's fried hard drive.