Remster

Hope someone here can point me in the right direction.

My Laptop finally decided to give up at the weekend following weeks of random crashing and me trying in vain to cure the problem. During booting up it comes up with corrupt CONFIG.SYS and suggests trying to repair from original disc etc. As I only have a restore disc with the drivers etc. I am pretty sure that if I boot from this, it will do a clean install thereby loosing all my files. I have 90% backed up but the remaining 10% are recent family photos & videos plus my i-tunes library.

Question is, prior to doing a clean install from the restore disc, is there any way of accessing the hardrive of the faulty laptop by connecting to my spare laptop? If this is poss. can I then extract the files?

Thanks in adavance.

andys

You can get an USB adapter which plugs into spare laptop your old hard drive. The old drive will then apear as another disk on the spare laptop. You can then just copy off the files you need.

rmtypeR

As you mention "weeks of random crashing", I thought I'd add that I've seen this type of thing happen before (messages about corrupt files) and the actual cause is not the HD but the RAM. Were the random crashes once you got into windows? e.g. "explorer.exe has crashed" sort of thing?

Running chkdsk sometimes fixes the corrupt files, only for them to go wrong again within 5 minutes as the faulty RAM is causing corrupt data to be written to the disk. See if there is an option in the BIOS setup for IDE self-test or similar. If so that should tell you if there is a problem with the disk or not.

Obviously if you can't even get into Windows to run chkdsk then the above is not much use to you unless you have a diagnostic CD to test the RAM, and with a copy of chkdsk on it!

Remster

Cheers guys.

rmtypeR, you might be on to something. The symptoms you describe are very similar to how my laptop began it's bad behaviour. However, I can't get far enough on boot up to allow running of any diagnositics.

Looks like I need one of these USB connectors then. I take it that I should remove the HD from the sick laptop and plug it into a USB port on my new laptop via this connector. Will the new laptop automatically detect the USB plugged in HD? Do I simply drag/drop the files onto the new laptops HD?

Finally, assuming the above is correct, where can I buy this connector?

Cheers.

Shark Man

Yes and Yes

The only issue is if your files are in My Documents, you may have to fiddle round with your user permissions to get access.

rmtypeR

With the USB cable converter the old drive will just show up in Windows Explorer along with your other HD's and CD drives etc. This is the one we use where I work (top one on the page)...

http://www.directusbstore.co.uk/cnb/...search-null=Go

scooby_me

iTrader: (1)

can you get the computer to boot so you can access the files over a network?

if so... R-Studio is what you need....

pm me if you would like to FULLY :-) evaluate this software prior to purchasing.

i would HIGHLY recomend it.

Darren

aqua

Or simply download Knoppix (linux) for free, create a Knoppix boot CD that will bypass all of the windows stuff and then use its built in cd burning utility to backup all your data using its explorer interface (similar to windows explorer).

I have used this many a time with great success. Just make sure that you have a CDR/CDRW drive attached when you boot from the CD.

http://knopper.net/knoppix-mirrors/index-en.html

cong

borrow somones copy of xp and goto into the xp recovery console and do a chkdsk this should sort it