Help save our files
- Started 23 years ago
- Last post 23 years ago
- 10 Responses
- nosaj
My business partner’s laptop has died with all his files, including our business plan and contacts etc.... Any help would be really appreciated.
It's an HP Pavilion laptop running Windows XP. When he starts up it only makes it as far as the screen where you can choose to boot in Safe Mode etc... No matter what he selects on this screen, then computer freezes. Any suggests as to how we could try and retrieve his info would be really helpful. Thanks.
- matt240
take it to a shop and get them to pull out your harddrive - then they can back it up on another machine. worth the money to do it
- sp0
have you tried running the windows repair from the xp cd?
just boot to the xp installation cd and press r when it asks you to.
or get it off the platters like matt mentioned.
- phaln0
This doesn't sound like a Hard Drive problem to me at all. If anything, this sounds more like WinXP's fault.
I had a similar situation happen about 2 years ago on my Win2k box - no matter what I did, that damn safe mode screen wouldn't let me enter Win2k.
Try doing a "chkdsk" - this will tell you if your hard drive is failing in respect to bad sectors. I would then definitely go with Windows XP Repair first, if the hard drive is good, and then if that fails, I would back everything up (excluding programs he can reinstall), and reformat the thing. Then reinstall XP.
Let us know if it works.
- phaln0
One note on doing a "chkdsk". Try to get to a command prompt. Failing that, use your emergency disk to boot up the machine. If I'm not mistaken, it should be on there.
- nosaj0
Thanks so much for the fast response! We finally got it to boot! Looks like either the Ethernet or Network card is fried (it actually smells like something is burnt). Luckily we have a spare laptop... The computer doesn't mean much, but we would've been up a Creek if we'd lost his files.
- phaln0
Very odd, indeed.
- angelus350
Should be a learning experience not to have such critical data without a proper backup solution. Glad everything worked out for you though.
- nosaj0
I know. Always back-up, what were we thinking... Still not clear sailing yet. We can get it powered up for a minute or two but then it keeps freezing. It may be tricky transfering these files off. I would bring it to a shop and have them load the hd into another machine, but that would void the HP Warranty.
- poopy0
I'm going to back up all my files now!!!
- surfito0
i dont think you can do this in a laptop, but i had the same problem on my pc, so i went and bought me a new drive, set the old one to slave, and transfered my files then formated the old drive.
there must be a way to do something similar on a laptop.
or do the "take to shop"sugestion