data recovery

SHEPEIRO

my old laptop has a load of data that i need to recover off its partitioned drive. im not really that technical :-P but basically think vista is dead not the hardware (fingerscrossed) as it starts but then windows loading screen just goes on forever. as does the recovery tools.

just need to be pointed in the direction of some goood info about how to go about this and what is fixable, or do i need a full re-install or what???

cheers for your help and move this if its supposed to be in tech talk

PolyHertz

Well I'd get an external 2.5 hdd enclosure (make sure you know if your using sata or EIDE), shove it in their and run the drive from another comp. As long as its just your OS that's bad you should be able to grab everything off their easily like that.

notman

PolyHertz wrote: »

Well I'd get an external 2.5 hdd enclosure (make sure you know if your using sata or EIDE), shove it in their and run the drive from another comp. As long as its just your OS that's bad you should be able to grab everything off their easily like that.

I would start with that... just to make sure your data is safe. Then I'd move into repairing your Vista install, which there are plenty of online guides saying how to repair vista with the install CD.

SHEPEIRO

cheers, great advice, needed somewhere to start.

Saidin311

PolyHertz wrote: »

Well I'd get an external 2.5 hdd enclosure (make sure you know if your using sata or EIDE), shove it in their and run the drive from another comp. As long as its just your OS that's bad you should be able to grab everything off their easily like that.

OK followup. I've got a couple of really old dead hard drives that I can't really remember if the hardware died or if it was something else on the computer and I just replaced the drive and left the data for dead.

They are old EIDE drives. What is one of these enclosures? how does it work? If there is corrupt data or massive viruses on these drives will I run the risk of screwing up my computer? I've always wondered what was on these drives, (because it's probably been like 8-10 years now) but I've never found a way of plugging them in and checking them out.

carlo_c

[ame]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Hard-Drive-Enclosure-External-Connector/dp/B000B8JMK0/ref=sr_1_11?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1234222864&sr=8-11[/ame]

Something like that would let you plug an IDE hard drive into it, they usually are USB and have a power cable too. They just get recognised as an external storage device, and you can access whats on them if their not in some obscure file system

I used one to grab data off an old HD that wouldn't boot a few months ago.

SHEPEIRO

that looks like the ticket

PfhorRunner

Lampoly wrote: »

There's a colection of tools called Hiren's Boot CD.

Hahaha, I'd stay away from that, its full of warez.

Go with the Ultimate Boot CD, the website looks kind of shady, but its got some awesome programs on there. Always useful in any situation.

http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/

oXYnary

Having had to work with some systems recently with bad partitions..

http://www.ubcd4win.com/

But you need a windows system and a i386 folder to create.

Hirems is good. I like Ultimate Boot CD the best though. Get the 5.0 beta as it has a linux distro partition fix or something that allows you to work with bad partitions including recovery.

You might pick up this as well:
http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

With what your describing though, have you tried to press f8 right before the windows boot screen and attempted to go into safe mode? If that fails, and you hadn't added any new hardware before hand...

You might want to run memtest 86+
http://www.memtest.org/