Help Please

My son and I bought two computers at a computer fair earlier last year.A problem with my sons motherboard prompted us to put his hard drive as a slave in mine till we could fix his own which worked well.He took his hard drive out to place in another computer of a friend to copy a game and now his hard drive will not work,has a windows protection error and we do not know how to fix this without fdisking the drive.Can someone help me?The harddrive is a 40 gig maxtor.Any help or suggestion will be appreciated,thank you.

 

Welcome to TSG !!

I have had success with deleting the sound and video devices in safe mode. Reboot and let the OS install the devices again. Give it a try and see what happens.

 

Welcome to TSG, sevenjay.

The first thing I'd do is see if it will start in Safe Mode without that error. If Win98 or WinME, press and hold the ctrl key immediately on startup and select the Safe Mode option. I don't expect it's Win95, but for that, tap the f8 key repeatedly (also works for 98/ME)

If it starts in Safe Mode, look in Add/Remove programs for anything newly installed, such as that game.

If no new installs are obvious you can try running msconfig and disabling the "process startup group" , autoexec.bat and config.sys startups to see if anything specific there is causing it.

A shortcut solution to the whole mess might simply be to select the "command prompt" option from the Startup Menu (instead of Safe Mode) and at the c:\> prompt enter:

scanreg /restore

use your arrow keys to select a started registry dated prior to the problem from one of the first 4 displayed.

More help on troubleshooting Windows Protection Errors in this link:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;en-us;q149962