I finally went to the Geek Squad at Best Buy to see what it would cost to recover the data from the hard drive. He told me that if I got a new hard drive I could reload the Vista on the new drive then power down the computer, reinstall the old drive and I should be able to recover the data on the old drive. Sounded like a good idea.
I was able to load the Vista on the new drive, but when I try to boot up the old drive, it goes into the blue screen and says something about doing a "data dump for a crash" and continues in a routine that acts like it is trying to reboot over and over.
I have tried to get into the BIOS to cofigure the second drive as a slave but I can't figure out how to do it. The drives are 320G Western Digital SATA drives and there are no jumpers to set for master to slave.
What am I missing? I really need to get the data off that old drive.
Edited by jram723, 19 September 2008 - 10:16 PM.