PC problem

having major problem with hard drive on pc, it wont boot up , can get access to BIOS screen but cant seem to make any head way at all have even put into another PC as alternative drive but it wont see it!! Can also get it to start from last known good configuration and safe mode but it all ends up the same just a blue screen with an error code on it......
can anybody help????? I've been told that i can reformat drive but i've alot of stuff that i dont want to loose from drive.

Last time this happened in work we bought a new hard drive and used [broken link removed] (free tool) to duplicate the drive which was dying. It took ages to copy (due to CloneMaxx needing to do many, many read retries on many, many sectors) but it worked in the end. We then used PartitionMagic or [broken link removed] bundled version of QtParted to resize the partitions to use up the additional disk space (the new disk was larger than the original) and slotted the new drive into the old PC. Voila - a recovered PC.

thanks a mill. clubman will give it a go

To supplement CMs good advice, if you have a bit of time and another pc you could try the remote recover app from sysinternals which lets you try to recover another disk, even a dead one on another pc. Havent tried it myself but Ive used other sysinternal software and its usually topnotch.

[broken link removed]

The "system defrag on boot" app. has had the most significant impact on the speed of my machine then anything Ive ever done before.

I have used the following method to recover data from craptops. Get a copy of Knoppix Linux version 3.3 ,( it costs about a tenner) and it is a bootable cd. So boot her up with the cd in the drive and let the OS load, slap in a USB memory stick or PCMICA microdrive and copy over the data. The Knoppix interface is fairly intuitive.This method works only for software related glitches.If the heads have collapsed on to the disk platters its game over, and time to call in the data recovery boys but they will probably charge you about a grand. Good luck.

Just to clarify - Knoppix, [broken link removed], Ubuntu and many other live CD GNU/Linux distributions cost nothing if you download the c. 700MB ISO CD images and burn them yourself.