Okay so my dads notebook wouldn't book windows any more because it was missing a file. A tech guy at a local pc repair shop insisted it was the HD that was messed up. My father didn't have his original windows xp home (2004?) disk so i decided to reformat with my xp pro (2007 ?)disk. All seemed well as it was in its second stage of formatting that it stopped and said there was something wrong with the hard drive, so we bought a new one. Thats running fine, no problems, currently getting xp pro 07 in it. How do I get a couple files from a few folders from the old hard drive? I had some odd ideas, and I didn't know if they would work well but something like getting DOS on to a cd and booting off of that, then transferring the files from the connected old hd a flash usb drive. If thats possible, where do I get dos for boot and how do i burn it on to a disk, does it have to be an ISO? Also I looked and found some product that would clone the hard drive files then be able to transfer to the new when plugged in, but i dont know how that would work, and i think the product and software is like 40$ and i forget the name of it. Any help would be great thanks.

Formatting the drive makes any recovery difficult. You could google something like recovery software and see what turns up. The least expensive way to clone a drive is with the software that comes with a new drive. It can also be downloaded from the manufacturer's site. For future reference, Dos access to an NTFS partition (the kind XP usually uses) can be done with NTFS4DOS software. Googling that will turn up a download site. It's too late for that now at least until you get something recovered.

Formatting the drive destroys all data on it (in theory), if you ever have this situation again remember to try and recover the data BEFORE formatting. Unless this data is really important then just accept it's gone, learn your lesson and move on. If you still want to try and recover it then (as mentioned above) you need some recovery software. This probably won't be free and often won't recover anything useful either! Wizard ICT. Microsoft Certified Professional