I'm at a total surrender state. I thought by buying a new 320gig drive I would have fixed the problem. What happened to my old backup HD now happened to the brand new backup HD. As mentioned before, my second physical HD was partitioned in 3 sections. 1 to run another version of XP and the other 2 to store pics and music. I had configured all 3 partitions the way I wanted them successfully. Please see: http://home.comcast.net/~robertoav/... This morning I tried to boot XP in the new HD and i got the blue screen about conflicts with drivers or hard drives. After a few reboots I got a message saying that the file hal.dll was corrupted or missing and couldn't boot anymore. I went back to boot XP from my main HD and found that the 3 partitions in the new HD are not accessible. Please see: http://home.comcast.net/~robertoav/... Needless to say I'm deeply pissed. This happened to my old HD and I thought it went bad. It took me days to trasfer 80 gigs of data to the new HD via a 1.1 usb! There's got to be something in XP or my bios that gets confused. What I don't understand is why my setup worked for 4 years and now 'something' changed. Any suggestion??

Does your bios support 48lba ? http://www.48bitlba.com/ ...if not data corruption can occur. Have you the latest BIOS Update ??

when I first installed the new HD I couldn't see more than 128 gigs. after installing : patch Q331958_WXP_SP2_x86_ENU.exe and EnableBigLba.exe all worked great for a week. I don't have a way to backup data before I upgrade the bios ( but the setup worked for years with the current setup. why would the bios be an issue now?). If I lose data on this HD too...i'll be really in trouble.

You must have a compatable 48LBA BIOS to utilise the Q331958 patch see: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/303... You did state you had problems with your old hard drive, therefore just patching an incompatable system may of been the cause!!

Have you tried a system repair? How to do a system repair.--Boot from the xp cd and go past the recovery console to the install menu. Select repair the existing installation. You won't lose any data except the xp updates. Unless you have a slipstream sp1 Or SP2 cd you will have to d/l sp1 or sp2 and all subsequent updates. You MUST have at least SP1 installed and the updates for security reasons. Be sure the firewall and A/V is active before going online as you will be susceptible to sasser and msblaster. http://computervitals.com/

(As mentioned before) where ?? Looking at the jpeg's I would say your bios does support 48lba or disk management would not list hdd as 289.08 gb. Did notice on befor jpeg hdd size is listed 298.08g while the other jpeg listed as 298.09g. If you enter the bios routine what size is the hdd listed as ? On the new hdd did you do a new install of XP or copy it from the old hdd ? Have you checked you system for viruses? You can try TESTDISK to recover the partitions on 2 hdd. http://www.cgsecurity.org/index.htm...