When (trying to) start my other computer I get an error message saying
" Can not locate OS system". I think the hard drive has crashed and like most people it was not backed up. There is some very important info on the drive and I was wondering if it can be recovered. The OS is Windows XP. Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

First make sure there is not a disk in the floppy drive.
Is it telling you it cannot find a file?

Press F10 at boot to see if you can restore the OS. I have an external USB hard drive case that I put old drives into to get important info off of to back up to CD,DVD or hard drive. Best Buy had them for about $90 bucks. Just put the old non bootable drive into the case and plug the USB into another computer then access via the drive menu and drag and drop or burn to CD/DVD

Kev

Doug's advice on the floppy drive is right on for the first thing I'd check as well as remove any CDs. 2nd, if it still won't boot and you have the Windows XP CD, you can boot from the XP CD and attempt a repair of your windows installation. It's possible that the sector on the hard drive that the boot files reside on could have gone bad, not the entire drive. A repair will scan the drive, mark the sectors as bad and try to reinstall the boot files. This may or may not work, and it's possible that the entire drive has gone bad.

If this is the case, Kev's idea is a good advice, get a new drive, pull the old one out and put the new one in, boot from a CD and reinstall Windows on the PC. Then you can try 1) hooking the old drive up as a secondary(slave) drive in your system provided there is room, or 2) getting a cheap external USB HDD enclosure for the drive and seeing if you can recover some files you may need off of it.

Lastly, here's a trick for you. If when you power up the PC or HDD, you don't feel it "spin-up" (let me know if you don't know what that means), ,it could be that the internal drive platters(metal disks) are stuck. If you can't get it to spin up when power is applied to it, a good trick is to put it in a plastic freezer bag and stick it in the freezer over night; then take it out, plug it in and get your data off of it if you can. This sometimes works because the metals contract in the cold and can sometimes help stuck drives to free up. Only do this if you are sure you can't access the drive at all and it is indeed stuck and not spinning up.

I had this happen and did all of the above without luck...But I took the entire computer tower to Best Buy,they have a Geek Squad store inside the Best Buy. They were able to get some of the info off the cooked hard drive...Then got a lecture on the USB backup drive which I have on Mr. new computer now,might try this as a last resort

Data recovery is almost always possible. Problem is, data recovery can be very expensive. Depending on how bad the drive is and what's wrong with it. If they have to disassemble the drive and pull the platters in a clean room, then you're talking big bucks. If they can get the drive to spin up, there are some software solutions to retrieving the data and it's not quite so bad. It's really going to depend on what's wrong with it, and how important the data is to you vs. cost. Computer stores are only going to be able to try the software route for data recovery. If that doesn't work, the clean room disassembly method will get farmed out to a specialty company. Try the other methods we mentioned before going this route.

Tried throwing the HD into another machine, either onto the cd ide cable as a sec primary or as a sec on the HD ide
Boot the machine up and the drive appears as a sec partition, copy paste the data u need to keep...Email folders/files, address book. favorites, documents, music etc etc...
The best method is to use a backup prog like Ghost 2003 and backup the whole HD in dos...From there u can the recover files, including 'deteted files from the ghost file.
If the HD doesnt show, use the freezer trick, thu u have to be quick cause it gets upto temp in a short time.
If the HD doesnt spin up, or the above doesnt work, u are looking at big bickies to have the HD disc removed as mentioned in a post above.

Thanks Guys for your input...I will finally go back to work on the 4th. I will take the CPU with me and see if one of our IT gurus can help me out. I will also take a copy of this posting and see if it can help them out.

Thanks again! :beers: