I have got problems with a sata Hard Drive. The system will boot to it but when I try to access any of the folders on it the system just shuts down and reboots. I put a pata drive on the system, the computer works fine with that but when I try to access the sata drive through the pata drive I get an error message saying the folder is not accessible, access is denied. All of my documents such as photos, spreadsheets and music are on this sata drive. Does anybody know of a good recovery program (at reasonable cost) that will recover all my info and maybe return the drive to its original state without to much trouble?

We need more background history. Does the SATA drive have WinXP installed on it? What service pack is included in the installation? When you have the IDE drive connected and are running WinXP from there does the SATA drive show in Disk Management? If so, maybe all you need to do is to take ownership of the files/folders on the SATA drive. To learn how to do that look at the link below. Do you know what backing up files means? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

Yes, the sata drive is running xp. Not sure of the service pack but it would have been the latest. Yes, I am running xp on the ide drive. Yes, I was cloning the drive weekly but both drives which were sata went down with in a couple of days of each other. See link. http://www.computing.net/answers/ha... PS: I have taken ownership of the files and can access everything now but I have still now have got the problem of when booting with the sata drive it is freezing on the welcome screen but now I can still move the mouse where I could not before. Just tried booting in safe mode and it is freezing on the same screen

Download a drive fitness utility from the manufacturer of your SATA hard drive/s. Burn to CDR and boot to it to test the drives. Post back if the drives pass for more help. Could simply be malware/spyware that is hanging you up. When you boot to the IDE drive do things work as expected then? That would tend to exclude most hardware as an issue.