Well, my hard drive died on me... and XP won't boot. Interestingly, when I pop the drive into an external enclosure, and turn it on inside of XP, it causes the computer to crash, and restart. I spent some time searching these forums for some help, but figured after about 15 minutes, that I should start my own post.

I would love to do this recovery myself, as the data is not worth what most companies are charging to do the service for me.

Can anyone offer me some pointers as to where I might begin, given the strange crashing symptom?

Any and all help appreciated.

It could be bad sectors / damage to partition table or file system structure in such away that it will hang the system. I suggest downloading manufacture disk drive test or you can try the partition repair/data recovery software by “Salvage Data Recovery Lab Inc”. You can find it easily if you just run a search in google its name… Instructions are clear while installing. Connect your drive as secondary drive on the system (not external) / or even primary and let that software run. That at least will let you know if drive is ok.

have you tried connecting the damaged disk as a second HDD on an operational XP machine (or just boot with a live cd like WinPE/BartPE/Winternals/Knoppix/Ubuntu/etc)? if it can boot and see your partitions on the damaged drive, you can try to use R-Studio to recover whatever is recoverable.

Another question - does the drive make clicking noises? If it does it really should go to either trashcan or a special (and very expensive) lab.