help boot error

ok my boot doesnt see my hardrive can boot from dvd with disk

my question is will i lose whats on my harddrive booting this way

win xp home with service pak 2

does it have recovery to save data aka pictures

That will depend on the why the hard drive is no longer being seen. It could simply be a need to replace a bad cable unless the read/write heads on the drive were going or gone. If you were inside the case at all recently you may have bumped the drive cable with it simply having been pulled out a little to see that be another prolem.

Simply changing the boot order won't effect data on a drive as long as that was intact to begin with. If the drive is not being seen on the bios post screen the cable or drive if not simply a jumper setting for an ide drive oculd well be going bad on you.

First examince the drive's data cable as well as the power plug to see if those are plugged in fully. The next step if found plugged correctly would be swapping the data cable and trying a different power plug to rule those out if not found bad.

The recovery methods used on XP are mainly for restoring Windows itself. If something on the drive itself is going slabing the drive in another system or bringing it in to a data recovery service would be the options. If however it is seen on the bios post screen and fails to load it may simply be a need to repair the boot information maybe a repair install if not a full reinstall of Windows.

Booting up with a live for cd Linux distro is another method to see if the drive is readable with certain distros like Knoppix or ubuntu live. First you have to try a few basic things to see if that was all it was.

bios post screen??? f8 it is not beeing seen only my dvd's and floppy are there

yes i was inside case will look at the cables now again

but jumpers?? please explain

have an asus HDD cable this should ide

You could have a bad cable. The flat ribbon type are simply packed in along with the boards in basically a small plastic bag. When thousands are taken from a bin in a factory some bad ones get out. I suspect the Asus floppy cable here is no good since the second floppy drive put in just lately brand new keeps bringing up disk not found errors pointing at the cable as suspect.

Likewise the ide cable for a hard drive can see the same type of problem easy enough. Trying out another ide cable to see if that one is simply no good would be the first thought. I went the langths here to order some far more durable dual nylon wrapped round cables since they seem to last far longer and not dry up and become stiff where problems start appearing.