I have a Maxtor 40Gb hard drive that I am having problems with. Through the "Check Errors" feature of Partition Magic boot disks I have received the error message "Partition Improperly Dismounted". Partition Magic suggests to run chkdsk /f to fix this. However, I cannot get into windows with the hard drive attached because I get a blue screen of death with a STOP message. I tried a Windows XP Install cd to use the recovery console but get the same blue screen when I try to enter the console. Does anyone know how I can run chkdsk in this circumstance or have another method to fix the problem? My goal is to get my data off the drive, I dont care what happens to it if I can get my data. thank you for the assistance.

can u get into safe mode bu pressing f8 or f5 also i had those erros i replace the mobo the ram cpu but never fix it good luck on trying :) never look at a dead man:

Chkdsk is a dos command. I don't even know if it's available for 2000. But if it is I wouldn't use it to fix the problem. Something like norton disk doctor would be better. It's also possible that using partiton magic has messed things up. Was the drive originally partition with partition magic?

Remove the drive and install it on another system as slave? But be aware that Win9X will not read it if it's NTFS.

I can't get into safe mode, I get the same blue screen of death. I can use chkdsk in Windows 2000 but I can't get into windows. I can't get Norton disk doctor to run because I can't get into windows. I've tried installing the drive on another computer and I get the same blue screen of death. Thank for the suggestions though. If anyone has any other it is greatly appreciated. I had given up but I figued I'd ask for help.

Go here for knoppix and d/l and burn a cd. Boot into it and see if you can recover the data. http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html Also GetDataBack from runtime.org. Upper rt. corner this page.

Norton disk doctor (usually ndd.exe) is often a stand alone program. If you have it on your computer you may be able to run if after booting with a bootdisk. Or you may be able to copy it to a floppy and then run it.