Getting Data off non-booting Primary Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter Steven Purvis
  • Start date Start date
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Steven Purvis

I have a Hard drive which is the primary hard drive for my
computer. Receintly the Secondary IDE channel has been
doing weird - the DVD and the CD-RW connected to it have
stopped working after a while, which has been happening
nearer and nearer to the boot up. The last time I rebooted
the computer it would not boot from the hard drive at all.
The splash screen for the BIOS appeared, and then sat on
the splash screen. I took the hard drive out and tried it
in another computer. The drive started to boot, but would
not actually boot. A "You have not shut this down
properly" type screen comes up, and no option on it, even
safe mode will actually boot properly. They start to boot,
and then get so far and then reboot automatically. I have
put in the Windows XP Boots disks and got to the recovery
console, but this will not allow me to copy information
off the disk onto a safe hard drive, as access to all non-
Windows directories is denied. I need to get some data out
of the Documents and Settings directory. before I can re-
install Windows XP, but don't seem to be able to do it.
 
Steven Purvis said:
I have a Hard drive which is the primary hard drive for my
computer. Receintly the Secondary IDE channel has been
doing weird - the DVD and the CD-RW connected to it have
stopped working after a while, which has been happening
nearer and nearer to the boot up. The last time I rebooted
the computer it would not boot from the hard drive at all.
The splash screen for the BIOS appeared, and then sat on
the splash screen. I took the hard drive out and tried it
in another computer. The drive started to boot, but would
not actually boot. A "You have not shut this down
properly" type screen comes up, and no option on it, even
safe mode will actually boot properly. They start to boot,
and then get so far and then reboot automatically. I have
put in the Windows XP Boots disks and got to the recovery
console, but this will not allow me to copy information
off the disk onto a safe hard drive, as access to all non-
Windows directories is denied. I need to get some data out
of the Documents and Settings directory. before I can re-
install Windows XP, but don't seem to be able to do it.
Click to expand...

The easiest way to access such data is to retrieve it from
backup.

The next way is to install the disk temporarily as a slave
disk in some other WinXP/2000 PC. If the file system
is intact then you may be able to retrieve your files.

Yet another way is to boot the machine with a Win98
boot disk from www.bootdisk.com, then run ntfsdos.exe
from www.sysinternals.com. This will give you read-only
access to your disk. You can now save important files to
floppy, but only with their short file names. If the files are
bigger than 1.44 MBytes then you will have to split them.

Ultimately you may have to consider this unfortunate event
as a rude reminder that all important files must be backed
up on a weekly basis.
 
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