Hard drive

[Guest]

A friend of mine told me that his computer wont boot up, he was wondering is
there still a way of getting all the information off his hard drive even tho
his computer wont boot?

 

[Ken Blake]

A friend of mine told me that his computer wont boot up, he was wondering
is
there still a way of getting all the information off his hard drive even
tho
his computer wont boot?

Perhaps the easiest way is to remove the drive from the computer, mount it
an inexpensive USB enclosure, then read and copy what he needs on another
computer.

He will probably need to Take Ownership. See
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;308421

 

[Shenan Stanley]

A friend of mine told me that his computer wont boot up, he was
wondering is there still a way of getting all the information off
his hard drive even tho his computer wont boot?

Not enough information. It not booting could mean the drive is toast or
just that something is wrong with Windows XP and it will not get past a
certain point.

Most of the time - if you put the drive in another machine as a slave drive,
put it in an external drive case (USB for example) or use an imaging
application to make an image of the drive - assuming the drive is functional
enough to do so - you can get everything off it.

 

[Patrick Keenan]

A friend of mine told me that his computer wont boot up, he was wondering
is
there still a way of getting all the information off his hard drive even
tho
his computer wont boot?

Yes. A simple way is to remove the drive, attach it to another XP system,
and simply copy the data off. You may need to Take Ownership when you get
the "Access Denied" messages:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308421

HTH
-pk

 

[John Wunderlich]

A friend of mine told me that his computer wont boot up, he was
wondering is there still a way of getting all the information off
his hard drive even tho his computer wont boot?

If you aren't comfortable cracking the case and moving the drive to
another machine, yet another method is to boot the machine from a
bootable CD then use the network or a USB drive to transfer the files
from the hard disk. Some good freeware bootable CDs are:

"Ultimate Boot CD for Windows"
<http://www.ubcd4win.com/>
"Knoppix" (Live Linux CD)
<http://www.knopper.net/knoppix/index-en.html>

HTH,
John

 

[AJR]

The Knoppix CD is great - it runs Linux, which can access ntfs file systems.
A benefit is that it runs from the CD and does not require installation on
the HD in fact most "Data Recovery" systems are Linux versions.
..