My Mesh PC crashed & when rebooting gave the error "Primary Master Drive Fails". It later got as far as offering me a Safe Boot but wouldn't actually do it! Several times I've used a boot disk & run scandisk which shows up lots of bad sectors & then gets stuck at 2% completed. Now it's gone back to it's original error message & won't let me use a boot disk. I'm now going to replace the hard drive but unfortunately I haven't backed up my latest files for the last month or so. If I made the old drive the primary slave drive, would a program like Norton Ghost be any good at copying files onto the new drive, bearing in mind the faults on the old drive? Any help gratefully received.

Both Maxtor and Western Digital drives have free software that will copy from old damaged drive to new in it's entirety. The last one I personally tried was a dead WD and it got almost every file copied to the new drive w/o error. It did take half a day but I only had very small percentage of corrupt when I was done. Jimi_l

Try running: scandisk c: /surface from the floppy. It `might' repair the bad sector problem long enought for you to save your data.

I slaved a faulty HD to a working PC and when I started the PC, a message asked me to confirm there was a hardware change. The bad drive showed up as E:\ drive when looking in MY COMPUTER. Opening E:\ drive I could search for file types .mp3 .jpg .mpeg etc (I can't remember what the address book file is) and copied them to the regular hard drive. I then burned them to CD-R. No special software required. My PC was Win ME and the faulty drive was Win 98.

This sounds a little crazy but I've heard that sometimes you can save data from failing hard drives by removing them from the computer and cooling them down in a plastic bag in a freezer. Then you have to reconnect the drive in your computer and maybe recover the data before the drive warms back up.

Just to update on the story, I've installed a new Western Digital hard drive with the old one as a slave. It didn't get far when trying to copy from the old drive because of the errors, so I installed the OS fresh on the new drive and I'm having to try & copy files bit by bit when it allows. Luckily I've been able to get most of what I need backed up. Thanks for all your suggestions.