In over My Head: WINDOWS WON'T BOOT!!! HELP!!

[keybowvio]

I consulted Gateway suport and they recomended a whole new approach:

that I stick a another hd in my comp to get the files onto.
I think that this will work because I have three other computers in my house, two of wich are outdated, I think they will work, but it brings me to my next question:
does the hd have to be formatted to run xp pro?
could it just be from a comp. running windows, say... 95?
the only files that I want to save are my .jpg images, about 1000.


they sent me this link:
http://www.pcmech.com/show/harddrive/52/

[Gecko]

Chances are that XP is on a NTFS file system not fat 32 like windows 95 or 98.
So you might not be able to read from your xp drive while booted into 95 or 98.
But the fact that you have a windows XP restore CD it could be fat 32
I know I have seen a few restore CDs that way from HP
You could check your system by booting from a Win98 boot floppy you can get one from www.bootdisk.com.

Once the system boots from the floppy at the command prompt type:
C: and press enter
Now type:
dir and press enter
If you get a list on the screen then it fat 32 and you should easily recover your images.
If it NTFS then you will get a “not valid drive” error

Do you know how to set the drive jumper to slave?

The system you currently are using to post here does it have a burner?
If so then we can take a different approach from a bootable CD

[keybowvio]

after much consideration I decided to just go for the install, all I wanted were some pics, and I discovered that most of them were on another comp.

now my only question is:
when I go to computer management I look at my HD heres what I see:
D:RECOVERY 2 gig C:HEALTHY 2 gig UNALLOCATED 100 gig.

!!!space available, 0mg!!!

how do I get the unallocated space to become part of the C drive?

[Gecko]

You can use “Computer Management” go to Start > Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management.

In the left pane expand Storage now select Disk Management
Right click on the unallocated partition from there you can delete the partition and then format it
Or you can just format it to NTFS and you’ll have a windows partition for backing up your files.

[keybowvio]

That didn't work, my only options were to make a new partition or to look at the properties, after reading a post somwhere else that said windows couldn't do it, I bit the bullet and installed windows from scratch, blew out the whole harddrive.
I now only have a few problems wich are ENTIRELY windows xp related, so I only see it fit to post them in the xp forum.

thanks for all of your help, I really did learn a lot:
how to alter the bios
how to burn iso images
how to use the gateway recovery
that I need to back up ALL of my data! lol!