So give it a try it can't hurt. BTW Do you have the XP setup disk? You should be able to boot from that into the repair console.
I wasn’t sure from what you wrote if the Laptop is still functional or not. But if the HD is okay then she can retrieve anything she needs off the drive.
I have a lot of old drives that people have given me and I use something like this to retrieve their data for them:http://www.meritline.com/25-sata-ide-hard-drive-enclosure-black.html
do you want a bootable cd or usb? if the macnine is old use the debris distro or xubuntu burn an iso cd....after booting from the cd look under System/Administration/Create a USB startup disc.
The answer depends on a lot of things. For now let us assume: 1) the laptop is loaded with windows of some recent variety, 2) that the hard drive is spinning and readable, 3) the laptop has a diskette reader. You may be better served to build a bootable diskette and try booting from that. If diskette booting works, *and* the memory resident programs can see the laptop’s hard drive (probably as C:), you can then copy to the flash drive. If there is a lot of data to save, you may want to use the USB port to hook up a portable hard drive and off-load to that. There are web sites galore that offer bootable diskette procedures.
Another procedure would be to remove the laptop hard drive and put it into another computer or a portable hard drive shell that has USB connectivity. You can then hook it up to a different computer and, if the folder structures are valid, copy from there.
Of course all of this depends on the viabibilty of the hard disk. If it doesn’t spin or the file system is corrupt, you are most likely out of luck.
Get back with more info if you wish, and I’ll be glad to try to help. I check my mail about once a day.
Bump
It can, someone at the office revived my laptop 2 years ago. I forget the name of it, but it’s linux based and allows you to boot the laptop and access files. I’ll ask for you when I get into the office.
What you want to be done, absolutely can be done. First thing, start to boot the troubled laptop, press (escape, f2, f10, etc) to enter the bios menu for the machine. Once there, usually on the advanced menu, it will usually have a boot order choice. You want to select the CD drive as boot. F10 to save the changes and restart the computer, placing the linux CD in the drive.
Most live cd distributions will work just fine with most laptops. I highly recommend puppylinux as an easy to use recovery system for laptops, plus it is tiny in size, while still maintaining a reasonable set of programs and utilities. You can copy the files from the internal hard drive to a USB drive once the distribution recognizes and mounts the external drive (or stick, etc).
90% of the time, I usually end up using an Ubuntu live CD, mostly because that’s what I have laying around, and again, it works. Less so in the future, as I just simply burned puppylinux to a business card sized CD to stick in my computer bag. Good luck.
i wouldn’t suggest a linux cd cuz her stuff is probably windows right. there are a lot of bootable utilities/versions of xp etc that will boot off of a usb disk. I saw a copy of xp yesterday that believe it or not is 99megs and installs in less than 5mins. but those sites aren’t ‘legit’ per say so i’d simply Google ‘bootdisks’ they are free and you should be able to burn one onto a cd making the drives accessable.
once yer in the best bet would be to partition it and copy the necessary files over to a secondary partition..but theres many options,her files aren’t spent yet..just be careful with the procedure. good luck.
you may wanna try here, it’s freeware and something should do the trick: http://bootdisk.com/
There’s a specific version of Linux called Knoppix which is great for tasks like this..
As with other versions of Linux it’s a free download.
Gotta be worth a try!!
If it’s a Windows machine, I would recommend building a Windows based live CD. I highly recommend a ‘Bart PE’ CD. As long as the HD is good, you should be able to offload any data to a flash drive.
I prefer this paticular live CD when I’m working on computers because it recognizes most hardware and you can get them prebuilt with lots of helpful utilities.
IMHO, The Linux based live CDs are best left for hacking.
The easiest thing to do is take the harddrive out and slave it into a working XP or vista machine. The working OS will discover the disk, check it to make sure there are no errors (which somethings even fixes the boot sequense).
Then you can capture the media files, burn them to a cd or DVD.
Why not just take the hard drive out and slave it to another machine, either in a USB drive enclosure or on the internal IDE of a desktop? There is a little card (about $5) that will allow you to connect a 2.5” laptop drive to the desktop size IDE cables. I don’t know about every laptop, but all the ones that I’ve had you could have the HD out in under five minutes.
Yes. You'll need to mount the hard drive after booting from a LiveCD like Mepis or some other distro. Then you should be able to insert a USB drive...you may need to mount that as well. Then it's a drag and drop process.
For a bootable USB, here is a utility to do it:
http://www.bootdisk.com/pendrive.htm
To access the hard drive from a usb, I use this:
http://www.byterunner.com/byterunner/category=USB+2.0+to+IDE+Adapters,+USB+2.0+to+IDE+Cables
My Acer Linux Aspire just arrived. Haven’t tried connecting it to the net.
Anyone got one? Any tips?