How do I make a working hard drive loaded with XP boot when it freezes at “system recovery” option at startup?

I used a USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA adapter from Cables to Go to connect the hard drive from my tower pc(running XP) to my new HP Pavilion 9000 laptop loaded with Vista. The hard drive that I connected was the hard drive loaded with the XP OS, and also had a "system restore/recovery" partition on it. It had special recovery software from Emachines (the manufacturer of the PC) I think.

Usually when the Emachines PC is booted, it first shows the main screen with the Emachines logo and also mentions "[F9] for Boot Options] and the like. Then there is a black screen that says "Press [F11] to start recovery __". The "__" is a countdown that always starts from 2 and then goes to 0. When it gets to 0 it always goes to a new screen where it informs you that it is loading Windows XP. I believe the countdown was to inform the user that after 2 seconds, it would be to late to press [F11] and therefore would have to restart the PC in order to perform the System Recovery. Anyway, it no longer behaves the way it should. Now, instead of continuing to the next screen after the count down ends, it posts a new line in the prompt bellow the first one with the same text as the previous line along with a new 2 sec. count down. It repeats the same thing over and over for eternity. I let it cycle through about 300 lines of crap and shut it down. After several more boots, it does the same thing, and the only response to me actually pressing [F11] is that the current line’s count down ends instantly, only to create a new line. Is this because I connected it to a Vista PC? The hard drive definitely works, but why can’t it be booted from? It’s detected by my old PC and it even loads to the "System Recovery" screen, so it must be connecting. Is there some way I can make the hard drive bootable again?

Also, I already tried using the same adapter with my tower PC and tried booting it that way, but it also freezes on the same screen.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

Recover data from formatted external hard disk?

Hi,

I have an external hard disk of valuable data that went under formatting by mistake. The partition it has was removed it seems, and now if we connect the external hard disk it does not get recognized. Probably because there is no File System in there.

So what’s best thing to do to save he data? If we try to format it with new file system, would we be able to recover the data through data recovery tools? As I know FORMAT does not erase all data on disk, it just creates a new file system and marks remaining data as empty.

If not, what would be the best option to get the data back?

Thanks

ARE YOU familiar with external hard drives ???? … RECOVERY SOFTWARE HELP NEEDED!!?

i have an older maxtor 300 GB external drive …

the partition was deleted from another computer but the files are still there .. i used a free trial sofware to see if they still existed..

my question is …

since maxtor was taken over by seagate … which software should i use to recover my files????

which is the easiest recovery software to use to get the job done????

will "seagate file recovery" work well for me??

thanx in advance!!

How do you format your Hard Drive without a recovery disk?

I DONT HAVE A RECOVERY DISK AND I DONT WANT TO LOOSE MY WINDOWS XP.

I only have one partition of my hard drive and all my data including windows is in it.

So please someone tell me how do i format my hard drive without a recovery disk but still keeping my Windows.

My computer won’t bootup, how do I do a recovery without losing data?

I have a Hewlett Packard media center computer and it has a problem booting up.. I heard there is a way to reinstall windows on the "factory image" partition and not lose all the data on my harddrives.. how do I find directions to do this? I have backup recovery disks (3 DVDs I burned), not a Vista installation disk.

Why does my hard disk have a ‘backup’ partition?

My hard disk (with a ‘k’ not ‘c’!!) has a 60gb partition in it called ‘backup’. Surely if my hard disk fails, BOTH partitions will fail - because aren’t HDD failures usually due to power problems (serges etc.), meaning that should my HDD fail, i will lose both the original data AND the ‘backup’ data?
At the moment, i use a networked, external disk drive - but it is not very good (it was made by netgear)
Any ideas much appreciated.
I don’t understand how backing stuff up to this partition can make my data any mores secure - because whatever i lose from my main parition (due toa hdd failure) will surely get lost from the backup partition at the same time.

what is the point??