recovering form a mishap

after getting my WC installed, windows took a crap. Luckily, it seems no hardware was damaged...windows is just retarted.

I cant seem to repair install or reinstall to my 120 gb hard drive, but i was able to install it on my dying 80 gb, which i am no copying all of my important stuff to from the 120...which seems to be working fine.

I started out as when i went to shut down the computer it would bsod and reset...then it wouldnt boot into windwos after that happened 5 or 6 times. (i diddnt feel like fixing it)

why would windows setup tell me my drive is corrupt and cannot be used, then turn around and let me copy almost 60 gb of data from it?

On a side note, at college in my $400 class i learned to make a dos boot disk today. Have yet to touch the A+ book they made me pay $90 for.
(why i'm in this class and not a few steps ahead, ask the school...they are making me take this one first)

Note: my a+ test is paid for and i will be taking it (and passing it) within the next month or so.

Install is a bit more sensitive to corruption than simply getting information off of a non boot drive. After the data is recovered, you should run full diagnostics on the drive and wipe it before use. This will enable you to determine if there are other issues and give you a clean and stable drive for data.

i will, after i get what i want from it, wipe the drive and replace my data..however, the drive i'm trusting with my valuable data in the mean time is hammering randoly, and i suspect it will be dead soon.

The main drive became corrupt because during a shutdown the computer would BSOD, spin down the drives, and reboot....it caused issues....then it finally died.

Turns out the bsod was cause by the pci GF4 420 i was using...i have my agp card back in now, but its so large i will ahve to rethink my watercooling design to work around it...as my pump's res interfered with the card.

Or i could win the lottery and get a better pump...nah, not today.

thanks for the suggestion, it is a good one.