Data recovery (1 Viewer)

[Luther Blissett]

I'll preface this post by saying that I'm in no way computer savvy so any advice, no matter how obvious, would be appreciated. My laptop crashed last night and when I tried to restart it I got a message telling me that Windows Vista wasn't loading and then it just went to a black screen. It has continued to do that everytime that I've tried to reboot and I can't get safe mode to work either.

The tech support guy at Toshiba told me that I'd have to reinstall windows and lose all of my data. Is there any way to save the files that are on my C drive? Granted as I said I am no Joe 90.

Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

 

[guy of the tiger]

yep.

Get a computer nerd friend to take your hard disk out and wire it up to another desktop as a secondary drive. It will be drive "D:" or something there. You might be able to pull files you need off it that way. The reconnect everything and reinstall windows or whatever you need to do.

If there's some hardware damage you might need to go down a more expensive forsensic route

 

[Luther Blissett]

Thanks for that. Hopefully I can give it a go.

 

[dudley]

gah, sorry to hear this.

i think you've a few options, hopefully.

depending on the type of drive, you *should* be able to buy a cheap enough data transfer kit, to just hook up to another PC.

something like this, i think
http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/saandidehadr1.html

first thing though, stop attempting to turn the machine on. if there is a physical problem with the drive, every time you turn it on you risk doing more and more damage to the drive

 

[Luther Blissett]

gah, sorry to hear this.

i think you've a few options, hopefully.

depending on the type of drive, you *should* be able to buy a cheap enough data transfer kit, to just hook up to another PC.

something like this, i think
http://cooldrives.stores.yahoo.net/saandidehadr1.html

first thing though, stop attempting to turn the machine on. if there is a physical problem with the drive, every time you turn it on you risk doing more and more damage to the drive

Thanks for that Dudley. Nice to know that all is not lost (hopefully!).