Windows XP Pro - with SP2 downloaded and installed
My initial problem was a reboot loop which you can read about here http://www.geekstogo...showtopic=84010 and then I ran into problems with lsass.exe - and I decided that the windows drivers had become corrupted somehow, and that data recovery was more important, so I went out and bought an extra hard drive and installed windows on that, slaved in the old hard drive (I have SATA, so I guess slave isn't the proper word anymore) and voila, was able to recover the critical files I needed.
The data corruption appears to have been caused by a power failure during boot up (which I did not know about when posting my original problem) - the power failure being caused by a circuit breaker which tripped do to excessive power consumption in our house (girlfriend was booting up the computer, running a heater, a humidifer, the toaster oven, and the electric thermos... she's a busy girl.)
Just to be safe when I slaved in the second drive though, I ran an additional Kaspersky on-line scan to check for viruses, and it came out clean.
- what I'd like to be able to do is repair the corruption on the old drive so that I can swap the drives around and just boot up from that one again. This would save me many, many hours of re-installing software, tweaking parameters, etc. So my questions are:
What is the best way to scan the drive for corruption and repair damage sectors? -I was wondering here if you have a recommendation other than chkdsk, which usually just says "yeah, you've got some damaged files" and then doesn't offer much more information. I want to make sure that I can safely use the drive - if not, I can ship it back and get a new one as it is still under a full warranty.
Is it possible just to replace the critical Windows drivers without affecting the other drivers? I'm wondering here if there is a list of all the drivers, etc. neccesary to boot up windows, etc - if I just copied the drivers from my new working and bootable drive to my old drive and then tried to boot up with that, I worry that I might run into some conflicts because of drivers that my software has installed as well.
...am I aiming for too much here? Or should I just be happy that I can poke around in the old drive and recover data? (I've only recovered the absolute essentials so far, there's still some 40GB of stuff on there I'd like to have.)
Your advice is much appreciated.
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