[Unethical]

I recently installed a new SATA drive into my computer which keeps corrupting itself, but thats not the wierdest thing... the last time i reformatted it, it booted up and ran fine for a few days (which is longer than it usually lasts) and when i shut it down 1 night an error box popped up which i didnt have time to read and now everytime i try to boot the drive it gets to the windows loading screen then then screen goes black and nothing happens... if i slave the drive i can access it, run programs and music off it, do anything with it really but it refuses to boot.

I've ran windows repair on it 3 times, tried the recovery console and everything else i can think of to get it working without formatting it and loosing over 400gb worth of data (some of which is important) and i've finally ran out of ideas...

Anyone know anything else i can try before i resort to reformatting and loosing everything?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[philthomas]

Depending on the size of the drive and the amount of free space, you could hook it up to another PC and use something like Acronis Disk Director, to shrink the existing partition and create a new one, large enough to install your OS on.
Then put it back in the original PC and install Windows to the new partition.

That will rescue your data, but if it keeps happening, the drive is probably on its way out.