Hard drive failure imminent, can't boot to USB

[x2f01]

I have an HP Media Center m7330n with Windows XP and Phoenix-Award BIOS 6.0/Revision 3.42. In addition to the primary hard drive, which Windows is installed on, I have a 10-year-old 40 GB hard drive hooked up.

Every time I turn on the computer, I get a message from the BIOS that "hard drive failure is imminent" for the old 40 GB drive. As a result, I tried to save every important file that I could from it to the newer, primary hard drive. Unfortunately, it takes about 15 minutes to start up Windows, and I have to cancel a CHKDSK scan of the old drive every time. After fighting through some cyclic redundancy check errors from Windows, I got most of the files that I wanted over to the new drive. However, while I was trying to copy one last folder of pictures, I got a "Windows - Delayed write failed" error message and the drive disappeared from My Computer and the Disk Management console. When I turn off the computer and turn it back on, the BIOS still recognizes the drive and it shows up in Windows (15 minutes later) when it boots back up.

I figured this wouldn't be a problem, because I have an .iso file of the Windows 7 install disk on another computer. I made a bootable USB flash drive and copied the install disk files to it, and I could just copy the files from the old drive that I wanted to save to another flash drive or to the new hard drive via the Command Prompt from the Windows 7 repair tools.

When the computer turns on, there are the options to press Esc for the boot menu (the only way to boot from USB, for some reason it doesn't work automatically) and to press F1 for setup. However, like I mentioned before, the BIOS displays the message that drive failure is imminent for the old hard drive, and gives the option to press F1 for setup or F2 to continue anyway.

Here's the problem: whenever I press Esc to go to the boot menu to try and select USB boot, the hard drive warning comes up...but then pressing F2 does nothing. It doesn't let me continue, and the only thing I can do is press F1 to enter setup. If I don't press Esc before the warning comes up, then I can press F2 and continue just fine. I've looked though the BIOS settings, and as far as I can tell, there's no way to disable the drive failure warning. If I unplug the failing hard drive, I can boot from USB just fine, but it seems that while it's plugged in, I can't boot from USB because it doesn't allow the boot menu to come up.

At this point, it looks like I'll have to end up burning a Windows 7 DVD and trying to boot from it and use the repair tools from there, but I'd like to avoid having to go out and get a blank DVD to do so. I'm assuming I can't burn a distro of Linux and copy the files over that way because as far as I know there's no NTFS write support, and I can't reformat the new hard drive to FAT32 because it's got all my Windows system and recovered files on it now.

Any suggestions? I think I'm probably dealing with a limited amount of time left before the old drive goes down for good. Would burning a Windows 7 DVD and trying to copy the files using the Command Prompt work, or am I screwed? Thanks in advance.

[JoJo Gunn]

Originally Posted by x2f01

I'm assuming I can't burn a distro of Linux and copy the files over that way because as far as I know there's no NTFS write support, and I can't reformat the new hard drive to FAT32 because it's got all my Windows system and recovered files on it now.

If I read it correctly, your main problem is accessing that 40gig secondary drive?

Knoppix is fairly well known as a Linux "recovery" OS.

Knoppix 5.1 is what I'm familiar with. It's an older version, but likely all you'll need to read the secondary drive. Knoppix will read and write to NTFS (XP) or FAT32 (9x). Be careful with it because "out of the box" it will read and write to the Windows drive as well as the secondary one, but of course that's pretty much what you're needing to do, unless you have a spare thumb drive or some blank CD's or DVD's.... uh, no, you don't have a blank DVD and you'll kick yourself sooner or later for not burning that Recovery Disc that HP puts on a hidden partition.

http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/knoppix51-en.html