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I have a computer. Its a pretty amazing computer. I built it myself. It has 3 500gb hard drives in it, all with different OS's: XP, Vista, and 7.

Some how, it seems ALL 3 have gotten corrupted. one day I turned on my computer, I booted up XP. It gets to the loading screen, then BAM! a crash screen flashes on the screen (a 0x00000007 code) it automatically resets after that, so... logically, since that one stopped working, I figured I'd try getting booting Windows 7.

Windows 7 gets stuck on Startup Repair. And of course startup repair is unproductive and cannot find any problems. So I opened the command prompt and perform a disk check. It FINDS NO ERRORS! WTF right? So I try vista next and it won't even start because it says kdcom.dll is missing or corrupt.

What is really funny about all this is with Windows 7 and XP SOMETIMES it actually manages to pass the loading screens and I can use them like I normally would.

I'm pretty sure my data is safe because sometimes I can still access it. Is there anyway I could save the data, because I have like 400gb of data. After the problem started I moved all the collective data from all the hard drives onto the windows 7 hard drive, because that is the one that actually works most often.

So could I take that hard drive out and put it in one of those cases that allows you to connect it to another computer through USB, and transfer all the data there, or get a nice big external hard drive and pull the data off that way?

I realize that I'm gonna have to wipe the hard drives and reinstall windows on all of them. I just want to be able to put all my data back after doing that.

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    Have you installed any new hardware recently? Did you install any new software recently? Can you boot into safe mode? Have you ran virus scans?
    – MaQleod
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 5:56
  • no new hardware, no new software, cant boot into safe mode, Virus scan on 7 finds nothing, and i cant seem to open norton in xp. im pretty sure xp is the where the problem started.
    – Sean
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 6:16

2 Answers 2

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Yes, you can use a hard drive enclosure to connect your drives to a different computer to copy your data to a new location. You can also use an Ubuntu live CD or flash drive (or other Linux distro if you prefer) to boot your computer and copy your data that way.

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  • well the problem with a cd or flashdrive would be that there isnt enough room. i have roughly over 400gigs of data that im trying to save.
    – Sean
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 6:17
  • also, if i were to open it up, take out the harddrive and put it into an enclosure, what are the chances of it not allowing a transfer if the data is corrupt? or, what are the chances of my data being corrupted? lol.
    – Sean
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 6:19
  • How could a thumbdrive boot benefit my situation...also...where can i download something that will allow me to boot my computer from this thumbdrive? if you could give me a link, that would be amazing. to be able to get back on 7 would be amazing, as that is where all my data is now.
    – Sean
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 6:28
  • ok....i just went to the Ubuntu site, if i were to mount this onto my usb....i could have access to ALL my files? where i could then, get another harddrive, and make the transfer right there on the spot?
    – Sean
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 6:58
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    @Sean: Get another hard drive or connect to another computer over the LAN. Either works. If the thumb drive boot doesn't even work you're probably looking at hardware problems (bad RAM for example) instead of just the hard drives. I already suspect something like that because honestly, short of someone running around with a strong magnet or an EMP burst, 3 hard drives going out at the same time is too much of a coincidence.
    – doppelgreener
    Commented Nov 11, 2010 at 7:32
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The chances of three drives failing simultaneously are very small. More likely you have a hardware failure elsewhere, perhaps in the disk controller, perhaps in memory, perhaps elsewhere on the motherboard.

I have an IDE/SATA to USB adapter I use to test drives on other computers, to migrate data etc, I would check the drives on another computer and run diagnostics on the faulty PC.

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  • Consider the case when the disks are not bad, but access to the disks is: I had a case when the BIOS battery was empty. After replacing it, Windows failed to boot with a blue screen, being unable to find the OS. As it turned out, BIOS forgot the AHCI mode of the SATA/RAID controller when the battery was empty.
    – U. Windl
    Commented Sep 11, 2021 at 23:38

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