Recovering Windows with 7.04

[Ohnonomiss]

Hey, so I have a crashed laptop from about a year ago (due to some displaced anger, the screen to the laptop is about 80 percent unviewable, and the hard drive is crashed). However, there are some important files I would like to recover off of the hard drive (when the hard drive crashed, it was partitioned in two, both NTFS partitions, one partition with the windows installation files and one with pure documents).

I ran the 7.04 FF disk as a Live CD to recover the files onto a flash drive. However, it is very difficult as I cannot see much using the laptop screen, and when plugged into an external monitor, it does not output the video automatically, and I do not know how I can tell it to, especially when I cant even see what is going on in the screen.

I was lucky enough to somehow find a shortcut that edited the background picture on the desktop. Through this mini sized window I searched for a hard drive, but no hard drive was apparent.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong when looking for the hard drive. I'd have to be able to see the screen if so I could find out what is going on (I cannot even see the command line if I run Konsole). I don't know what to do, and my hard drive doesn't even pop up. Any help would be great.

[Fintan]

Re: Recovering Windows with 7.04

To be honest? I would just buy an adapter (IDE or Sata or whatever) for your laptop HD, take out the HD and hook it up to a desktop pc then copy the data over to where ever you want.

Of course you could try and use the knoppix live cd:
http://www.knoppix.org/
It automaticly mounts all drives and partition onto the desktop (small as it may be). Maybe you can then copy over to a flash drive.

Sorry I can't be of more help on this
Cheers
Fintan

[eriefisher]

Re: Recovering Windows with 7.04

If the drives don't even spin there is noway to get the data from them without removing the platters and installing them into another hard drive. I also had this problem a while back. Luckily there wasn't much on it to lose.

sorry

Always back up.

[dibl]

Re: Recovering Windows with 7.04

the screen to the laptop is about 80 percent unviewable, and the hard drive is crashed

Are you sure that hard drive actually "crashed" (physically locked up)? If it was just a momentary contact while you drop-kicked a 30-yard field goal with your laptop, that hard drive may actually work well enough to copy the data off to another system, when given a power supply and a data cable. I'd carefully remove it from the object of former anger, figure out how to connect a 12V power cable to it, and an IDE cable into another PC, and see if you can "see" it. You might need to adjust the BIOS of the newer PC, to tell it this particular IDE drive is not an IDE "master", or set it later in the boot sequence than the one you need to boot -- in other words you don't want your PC attempting to boot it, probably.

Good luck -- I hope you get your data back!

[penguin.ch]

Re: Recovering Windows with 7.04

In addition to the pointer at Knoppix (my favourite in terms of disaster recovery as well ...), you may want to search the web site of the laptop's manufacturer for useful advice on how to make use of an external monitor ...

[Ohnonomiss]

Re: Recovering Windows with 7.04

Thanks for all your replies.

I did undergo some of the steps previously mentioned. There was excessive amounts of my personal files on the hard drive. I did send the hard drive to a local computer shop who backed up MOST of it for free (since it was a friend who did the favor, I didn't bother being nit-picky and asking him to do it again for the other files he missed). I remember all they used was an external power cable and notebook-IDE to USB cable.

In response, I tried an external enclosure. The drive would turn on and was sensed by the host computer, but very slowly, and the drive was inaccessible. I gave up on this method.

I also tried the Knoppix live CD. However, the Live CD wouldn't boot - every attempt it would stall midway through bootup on a particular step, the same step all the time, and I couldnt read what step it was. The Kubuntu Live CD worked perfectly, though. I just couldnt see anything.