GazTheHat

A friend has dropped his laptop round. He installed some "software" and now the machine is in a boot loop. Says there's an error, goes into recovery, then reboots and keep doing this.

He needs the files off the HDD, but after that can wipe it. What's the best way to go about this?

ronniej85

back up before it ***** up

Norman Dog

iTrader: (1)

Connect the drive to another PC and remove the data that way.

http://www.storagedepot.co.uk/Extern...c883/p753.aspx

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Don't even need that:

If you have a SATA desktop/tower computer (most are), then just get a SATA lead and pop the lid off and hook it up via a spare SATA/power socket in there.


As for the laptop...tried hitting F8 (repeatedly) until it comes up with a menu and booting into safe mode?

If that works its probably saveable. First thing I'd do before trying to recover the OS though is BACKUP

(why do people keep such important stuff on laptops without backups?...they are the most prone type of computer to **** up its unbeliveable )


And for future reference - tell him to stick all personal data in a seperate user partition, makes it a hell of a lot easier to find when if/when it dies (you can set up my documents, my pictures etc to point straight to it).

GazTheHat

I tried F8 and Safe Mode, a blue screen flashes up with something, then back to the Dell startup again.

If i let it boot up, it comes up with Windows Error Recovery
- Launch Startup Repair
- Start Normally

neither work.

So to do the backup, i need to connect his HDD to my machine then. It's not gonna screw anything on mine is it?

Out of interest, why move the My Documents etc to another partition? I have all mine still pointing to C:\ my documents etc. (* Didn't know you could change that until just

Norman Dog

iTrader: (1)

It sounds to me like the hard drive's fooked.

This link may help.

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...&isLegacy=true

andys

Well one reason is some people like to place the os on a ssd drive which are still quite small and so keep all the docs on a nornal sata drive

GazTheHat

Didn't know you could do that.

I tried that and it came up with no errors.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Not always so.

Could be just a corrupted operating system. Faulty RAM for example or something else can just as easily cause this.

To diagnose a faulty hard drive (or controller) you need to run diagnostic software. There are freebie ones floating about. Usually the drive manufacturer has them free to download (to allow testing for warranty returns) For example Seatools (bootable DOS version): http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...00dd04090aRCRD

Not sure if works for non-seagate/maxtor drives, but I can't see why not.

As for partitioning. Its all about organisation. If all of your personal data is on d:\ (be that a seperate partition or drive) then you can take a image or backup of the root directory knowing you have everything important. Likewise, should you need to do a system restore or reinstall windows on drive c:\ you can do so without causing any harm to personal data (i.e like whatever is in c:\users\username\mydocuments etc. ).

Obviously tweeks need to be done to get everything seperated (e-mail/outlook store folder, favourites, contacts, public, my docs etc )but thats pretty easy.