You might be able to get your personal files off the PC, before doing the
restore/destroy with the e-machines provided CD.
If the partiton with your data is FAT32, you could use a DOS boot floppy.
If it is NTFS (likely with OEM XP), then a DOS floppy plus NTFS drivers will
permit copying off the hard drive. The necessary read-only/copy drivers are
free from
www.sysinternals.com. If your PC has no internal floppy, think
about adding one, as they are cheap. However, you could also make a
bootable CD from a floppy. Both Easy CD Creator and Nero can do this.
If your PC does not currently boot first from floppy, second from CD, third
from hard drive, you will need to change the BIOS setting under the BOOT
tab.
Of course, you need some place to copy the files TO. If you have a second
hard drive, second partition on the primary hard drive, ZIP, or other
internal drive this is easy. If you have nothing else internal, there are
USB drivers for DOS, but quite frankly I have had limited luck with them.
And, then, there is the good old floppy, although that is usually a bit
small.
Then, there are several LINUX-based rescue CDs. I have had excellent
results with KNOPPIX.
Finally, there are several disk imaging programs that could copy your entire
hard drive to an external hard drive as an image (single compressed file).
Many programs in this category permit the recovery of selected files or
directory trees. For example, Norton GHOST and Acronis True Image. ( I
prefer True Image 8 over GHOST 2003, although the newer GHOST 9 sounds
interesting, but it also might be more limited in some ways.) So, after the
PC is "fixed", you could get back only the files you want. The detailed
steps for such a save/restore of files would be something like:
1. buy software
2. install temporarily on a good PC
3. make bootable media with backup/restore software (floppies or CD)
4. run backup form old PC to external USB disk
5. move external disk to working PC and verify you can extract single
file(s). This processes is called Ghost explorer or mounting an image,
depending on the software, and it only works on the PC with the
softwareinstalled, not from the bootable media.
6. if step 5 works, use the OEM CD to "fix" the PC.
7. recover fils with the other PC to any media that the repaied PC can
read, including as single files/directories on the USB disk.
8. copy file back to repaired PC.
Then,
9. uninstall backup program from good PC and install it on now-repaired PC.
10. make a backup of the now repaired PC. This can be used instead of the
emachines CDROM, and it is more current.
11. In the future, make occassional backups of the PC, so you can return to
last week, or last month, instead of day-one. Do this especially just
before installing/unindtalling software or updates to software, including XP
updates.
12. More frequently, backup personal files. XP's windows explorer or the
DOS-like commands "COPY" or "XCOPY" work very well on persoanl files. (They
do not work on key system files.) Be sure to use the /V parameter, where
"V" means verify, or check that the copy matches the original. For more
informtion on these command, type the command followed by /? in a command
prompt window.
Good luck.
