Dual Hard Drive problem

i have 2 hds on my computer, a wdc 120gb and a maxtor 20gb. the 20 gb one contains win xp and its the one i boot from. the second one is mainly for storage. i recently got a virus that caused my computer to not load up, i.e. i cant get anything to boot. is there any way to save the second hd? is there a way to get the data off that hd to another computeR?

if you have a second computer with a good virus scanner, you should be able to save the data by moving the drives to it. If you don't have a virus scanner, i wouldn't try it, wouldn't want to lose a second machine, y'know. Otherwise, if you have a knoppix boot cd, you can try using that to see what can be saved from the drive, and send it through the network, but again, the destination needs a good virus scanner, preferably something with some kind of real time file system protection. That's my advice. Good luck.

My suggestion would be to disconnect the second drive from the system, format the first drive, install WinXP, do all of the Windows critical updates, purchase and install Norton Anti-Virus (NAV) 2004, do NAV live update until it tells you that all updates are current, purchase and install Zone alarm pro, download and install Spybot search and destroy, install all updates, scan and innoculate, install ad-aware 6, update and scan.

THEN, re-connect your second drive, do a NAV scan on it and proceed.

Anything less is just asking for trouble. If your data matters to you AT ALL, religiously persue every aspect of your computer's security on a daily basis.