I need some computer help

[bigben]

first off I hate windows so much just with the problems I have been having lately.  two nights ago I was working on doing some video.  while working on said video I noticed movie maker was having a fit with it.  One thing I noticed about movie maker is it does not like complicated vids.  but that was the thing this was one video clip about 3 minutes long.  so.  my whole computer froze and I did a ctrl alt delete for the taskmanager.  once that finally came up I shut it down and gave it about 5 minutes.  tried rebooting and I get "A disk read error occurred press ctrl+alt+del to restart"  normally if this happened it was because there was a floppy in the drive.  so I checked em both the floppy and the cd drive.  nothing.  so I ctrl alt del and it keeps coming up with this message.  now I do have another hardrive from when I got the bigger 250 gb hd I took the old one out and put the new one in.  installed xp and did updates.  at the time when this thing crapped out on me it had service pack 2 on it which seems to be notorious for blank screens and slowing the system down.  I could just slap the original hd back in but I am wondering is the 250 gb hd toast?  is there anyway to bring back the info that was lost?  the only thing I would really want back is my emails.  but I am not going to lose sleep over it.  thanks for any help.  ben smyser

[FinsnFur]

Sounds like you might not have enough ram and CPU to run the Windows Movie maker.
But the first thing to ask is are you running anti-virus software, and is it kept up to date?...meaning daily.

I doubt the old hard drive is toast, but someone would have to look at it to tell. Take it to a computer place nearby and ask them to check it out. If it's not junk they can always ghost the data onto your new one. It's relatively cheap to do.

[Silvertip]

Sounds like a file that XP needs to run got corrupted when your system hung. Since you've got it up and running on your old disk, you can try adding your corrupted disk as a second slave drive. You may be able to then access it and copy off your data. Then after recovery format the corrupted drive and reinstall it as master drive and reload everything.