Here is the background: 2004 Dell XPS Gen5 desktop computer with 2 Western Digitial 75GB hard drives in RAID0. One of the drives is giving me near death errors and I get BSOD every time I try to boot. I can't operate in Safe Mode nor boot up with my Windows XP MCE 2005 DVD because my DVD drive does not respond, just my CD drive. I have gone into BIOS and modified the boot squence so I could try using a bootable USB to no avail, too. When I created a boot USB off the XP DVD with another Windows computer I would get various errors no matter what program I was using to create the bootable USB. I tried multiple programs to no avail. Therefore, I can not access Recover Mode on the desktop to try to salvage my data without doing a complete reformat and reinstallation of XP on the computer. I have an entire backup of my hard drive on a Seagate portable hard drive. However, I have done about 10 hours of additional photo editing on the computer since the last backup so I was wanting to be able to access my photos on the Dell rather than having to start my editing over. Furthermore, all my Photoshop Elements photos have 3,000 tags on them that did not make it to the Seagate drive. Since I am out of ideas to get to Recovery Mode, could I hook up the drives using a USB 2.0 to Dual SATA adapter to my other Dell laptop to pull the data off the drives with a device like this http://www.meritline.com/kingwin-usb-2-to-dual-sata-adaptor-wone-touch-back-up-model-kwi-s2---p-63957.aspx?source=fghdac? Wouldn't my Dell laptop just treat the drives like an external drive (e.g. my Seagate drive, USB drive, etc.)? Would the fact that my XPS Gen5 is Windows XP and my Dell laptop is Windows 7 be a problem? I am looking for a cheap solution. I looked on the web to see if any Dell XP MCE boot CDs (not DVDs) were available, but I couldn't find any.
Thanks for the reply, I finally got my computer up and running. For whatever reason, the DVD drive would not boot up a disk. When the computer was working, the drive would read DVDs fine through software, though. I discovered that if I eliminated the CD-ROM drive through BIOS setting, removed the ribbon connection on the back of the CD-ROM and install it on the DVD drive, I could boot up the DVD drive. I rebuilt the computer from that point on as I was unsuccessful in creating a bootable USB in the past.
