Need help installing second drive

Hi, my brother recently started getting an error "Missing file C:\windows\system32..." when starting his computer. He wants to reformat but beforehand he wanted to try and recover the files by connecting the hard drive to my computer. His is an SATA and mine is an IDE, and whenever I connect his drive to my computer it starts from the SATA, giving me the error message. How do I connect the drive so that it boots from the IDE and uses the SATA as a secondary, or is this at all possible? Thanks.

You'd have to go into your motherboard BIOS and change the BOOT DEVICE ORDER, setting the IDE as the primary or first device to boot from so it load your current working OS instead of his borked OS.

Ah, thank you. That worked.

On a second note, I've realized that I can just go in and replace the missing system32 files. Unfortunately, when I try to copy/paste them from my drive onto his it disallows this because it says that they are in use, and to close the program using them. Since I assume that it is windows which is using them, is there any way to do this?

Thanks again.

I'm not sure, technically if you are running a OS from your working HD/OS and not booting from his hard drive or OS his windows files shouldn't be in use.

You'd have to do a bit of digging around on google to fix the problem and even then, just transferring/backup your brothers files/programs that he wants to keep and doing a fresh install is usually the easiest route.

Check out this Article, I just read it over briefly but it may be of some use. He mentions things in the article such as killing the explorer process for windows but I'd advise against doing that, as again you'd be killing it on your working OS instead of your brothers.

http://www.jonmega.com/iceman/stuff/...background.php


Description of the Windows File Protection feature
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/222193

Transfer the files that your Brother wants over to your Hard drive (providing you have space for them all). Then do a format and clean install of Windows on your borther's computer. Even if you were able to copy the files (you would need to download them and have them in a .self extracting format or something similar) there is no guarantee that it would solve the problem. You are best off re-installing Windows. You could also try a System Restore, to a previous Restore Point before the error started happening.