How to recover data from a failed Vista HD

[Jonno]

I have a Dell Dimension E520, which won’t boot to Windows (Vista), as
described in the following thread:

http://www.microsoft.com/communitie...=4d432d17-8d66-4491-8f5e-248c1c2b8e92&lc=1033

I have given up trying to repair Vista, but now I would like to back up the
data on the drive before doing a clean install.

I have mounted the HD in a working XP box and tried to backup the contents
with Norton Ghost 2003 and Acronis True Image 11 Home. Neither Application
can back up the Documents and Settings folder.

If Vista fails both to load and to repair itself, as described in the
thread, how are users supposed to retrieve their data safely?

 

[Malke]

Jonno wrote:

(snippage)

I have given up trying to repair Vista, but now I would like to back up
the data on the drive before doing a clean install.

I have mounted the HD in a working XP box and tried to backup the contents
with Norton Ghost 2003 and Acronis True Image 11 Home. Neither
Application can back up the Documents and Settings folder.

If Vista fails both to load and to repair itself, as described in the
thread, how are users supposed to retrieve their data safely?

1. How about restoring files about from backups? Oh, don't have backups? I
guess that's Vista's fault, hmmmm?

2. Are you trying to image the drive? If so, do it from outside of Windows.
Make the bootable True Image CD and boot with it. Make the image and store
it on - obviously - a hard drive that is different from the target drive.

3. Or just copy the data from within Windows. You don't say what happens
when you try but if you're getting "access denied" errors you can either
take ownership of the files or boot with a Live Linux CD such as Knoppix
and get the files that way. Note that this won't work if you actually
encrypted the files. If you did, I hope you backed up your encryption keys.

Take Ownership of a File or Folder in Windows XP [Q308421] -
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=308421

How Do I Get the Security tab in Folder Properties? -
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/tips/xp_security_tab.htm


Malke

 

[Mick Murphy]

http://www.knoppix.net/

Above is the knoppix Live CD link.
Make a boootable Cd from the downloaded ISO file.
It does not install on your Hard drive, but uses your RAM and Graphics to
read Windows Files.
Copy them to a Flash Drive.

 

[Jonno]

Thanks for that info, to you, and Mick Murphy.

In answer to your point one, I back up my data and I’m sure most users of
this forum do, but I think it is optimistic of MS to expect the average pc
user to do so.

On point 2 I made a disk image using Acronis run from the Boot CD and also
run from the App in Windows, and in both cases the original drive had 45.1
billion bytes of data and the image drive had 43.7 billion bytes of data on
it. Why are they not identical, and is it possible the Documents and
settings folder got missed off?

On point 3 I don’t have a Knoppix distro. I might try with Ubuntu or
another distro, or I might download Knoppix. In any case I’ll post the
result here.

 

[Jonno]

Thanks for the thought Colin.

I have since done a clean install on a new drive and mounted the old drive
as Drive 2. Having taken ownership of the old disk, all the data in user
docs seems to be readable and intact.

I've returned the box to its owner, so I am unable to do no further research
on it.

And I've shown them how to use Vista backup and Acronis. So hopefully they
will avoid the same mess in the future.