files off hard drive?

[Guest]

I have a laptopt that I have to Restore windows on to but I don't want to
lose the files on the drive. Does anyone know of a way to get files off of a
laptop hard drive when the system will not start up and run. Thanks for any
help. Jeff

 

[Guest]

Have you tried booting in Safe Mode? Also, do you have the WindowsXP
installation disk? That disk is also bootable for a REPAIR install.
"How to Boot in Safe Mode"
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/capture/safemode.html

 

[Al Dykes]

I have a laptopt that I have to Restore windows on to but I don't want to
lose the files on the drive. Does anyone know of a way to get files off of a
laptop hard drive when the system will not start up and run. Thanks for any
help. Jeff

Several ways....

If you can use another PC to burn a Knoppix CD (bootable Linux) and
boot in your laptop you can copy files to a USB cd burner or over a
LAN connection to another PC.

http://www.knoppix.org/

You can use the eval version of Acronis True Image to do the same thing

http://www.acronis.com/

You can yank the disk out of the laptop and use a IDE little adapter
cable (about $15) to hook up the disk to a desktop machine as a second
disk and copy the files off to the the local hard drive. A local
storefront PC store would do this for you for about an hour's labor
charge.