hd ntfs partition won't boot..

[skylabel]

Hi there, Would greatly appreciate your advice.

I use WinXP installed on my 80GB HD on an NTFS partition. Couple of days back I was installing this photoshop plugin, suddenly the HD started to make a lot of noise (it used to be silent). I wasn' able to boot up the computer since, so I made a boot disk (Fat32 WinME command) on another PC, got the command prompt but I can't see my old files and dos only reports the drive as 20GB with some files on it. I tried FDISK which recognized the there is a 60GB NTFS partition and 20GB Extended DOS partition. The HD is still making quite a lot of noise.

I downloaded this demo program called Active NTFS Reader for DOS, which recognizes my files in the NTFS partition. But I can only view a listing of them.

I'd like to recover at least some of my files (work!). I know, i know, i never bothered to backup

Help. What should I do next? Can I convert NTFS to FAT32 in DOS?
Thanks in advance.

[muno]

You can't convert from ntfs to fat32 anywhere.

There is a free dostool that has read/write access to ntfs partitions.
Google for it, it's something like ntfsdos .

But, if you have loads of files, it takes ages to copy them all to floppy, and not all files even fit there.
Thus, the easiest way would be plugging the hd to some other w2k/wxp computer and copy the files over there.
-M

[phlatline]

Here's a site I found that might help u,
http://www.pillar-solutions.com/html...ofessional.asp
Also, I think there's a download u can get (cnet, me thinks) that will allow u 2 use the cd-rom in msdos, so hopefully u won't have 2 go thru the trouble of moving the HD 2 another comp. I would also look in2 a new HD, sounds like urs is bout fried.
Hope this helps.
Phlatline