I hope someone can help with this problem. I'll try to explain whats happening being as clear as I can!

This morning my PC just hung after booting normally. I rebooted and it then kept rebooting. When I tried it in safe mode it hung at mup.sys. I've looked through alot of postings on this but could not find the answer. The problem seemed to be that my C drive was a SATA drive and no matter what I tried I could not get the recovery console up.

This lead me to this post - I decided to use one of my IDE drives to install a fresh copy of windows on with the hope that having done that I could reboot choose that insallation to boot from and then access my SATA to retrieve my files and copy them to a USB HDD (loads of kids photos etc) the problem is when ever I connect the SATA drive and boot into the IDE copy of windows the PC Hangs just after the black windows screen. If i try this in safe mode it seems to hang at the same point as before, just after loading MUP.SYS.

All I want to do is retrieve my photos and a few other files.

Can anyone help my wife's freaking out that we've lost 5 years of photo's

Right things have moved on a bit.

I can now boot into windows although this takes about 3/4 mins. when it finally gets there the ViaRaid contol software reports the disk as failed.

Is that it then? Is it dead or has it just got its knickers in a twist?

I can get windows set up as far as seing the the disk with an unknown partition.

I think I might try the cryogenics approach!

Well, there could be many things wrong with the drive. I'll assume you're either on Window XP or Vista. Either way, there's software that can attempt to retrieve data, but it doesn't always work. Another thing you could try is you could send the hard drive to a data recovering facility. Although, that cost's quite a bit of money.

Best thing to try at this point if you can boot into windows is transfer any files you can to another hard drive. If you can't boot into windows on the Sata drive still, install a fresh copy of windows on another drive if you have one, and look on Google for data recovery software. Some you have to purchase for, but as I tell anyone with buying software, look for reviews of that program. If no one has heard of it, and you can't find any legitimate information on another website about it, don't buy it.

Good luck, and I hope you get everything sorted out.