Last one for '06: Externally booting laptop?

[Venkman]

Last one, I promise! Odd how all this stuff goes on at once.

My wife's laptop crashed. Blue Screen of Death type. It won't boot back up (it'll get to the WinXP loading screen and then restart). I've tried running the Repair XP function on the bootable CD-ROM, but it gets about 3/4 through the process and gives me a generic "there was a problem".

Normally, this wouldn't matter. I'd wipe the drive and reinstall. However, there's some digital photos there I didn't get a chance to back up (in fact, I was about to back them up when the issues started).

What'd I'd like to do is just boot to Windows, copy the files to a USB thumbdrive, and then wipe the drive. However, this being a laptop, I don't know what my boot options are. I know it can boot from the CD-ROM, but I haven't found anything that says "boot with this CD-ROM to load Windows OS functions". Heck, I'd settle even for DOS if I could get it to read the thumb drive.

What options do I have?

[schild]

Take out the harddrive, get an adapter, and mount is as a usb drive on your desktop? I assume it's Fat32 or NTFS. That's how I'd handle it at least.

Also, lots of boot from CD linux shit out there, could easily use that.

[bhodi]

schild's solution will work; You can also get them off directly. If you want the hard way, here are some dos USB drivers. Make a boot disk, copy your files over to USB.

The easiest way, however, is to introduce you to my good friend Hiren and his boot CD. I've sent you a PM directly, since it may not be completely legal in some locations I won't put it here. Everyone else reading along at home can do their own search and find it. Acquire it, burn it onto a CD, and there you go. Boot from it in your laptop, and under the menu, you want, under dos utils, the universal USB driver enabled. Then, just stick it in, browse, and copy over the files. If your HDD* is damaged, well, as you see, there are about a zillion and a half tools on there you can use to recover what data you can. If you don't want to bother with the CD, here are instructions on getting the boot CD onto a bootable USB, which you can then put into your laptop.

Hiren's bootcd is techie ambrosia. Live it, love it. I've lost count of the number of times I've pulled that CD out and saved the day. If you've never heard of it, you need to click the link above and check it out. You won't be sorry.

*For schild

[schild]

Bhodi, that was pretty cute what you did there.

[Lt.Dan]

You could also try taking out the battery and running the laptop off the mains.  I had and old laptop that went screwy because the battery had died, but it still ran fine off mains power.

[Trippy]

Press F8 while it's starting up to get the Windows boot menu and see it'll run in Safe Mode.

[Venkman]

That's the screen I generally get now. When I hit Safe Mode, it scrolls a whole list of .sys files. It hangs on atixxx.sys, and then reboots.

@Lt.Dan- Good thought! Tried that, same deal. Gonna move on with this thing I heard about...

[Miguel]

Download and burn a System Rescue CD.  It's a small version of the Gentoo LiveCD on a bootable image and you can very easily mount FAT32 or NTFS partitions and transfer files onto a USB hard drive or flash drive.  It's saved three of my systems so far.

Linky

[Yegolev]

I have an issue similar enough to need the same information.  What would help me A LOT just at the moment is an adapter to connect a laptop disk to an IDE or USB port.  My crappy searches have turned up nothing so far.  Any tips?

[Strazos]

I'm sure something along the lines of what you need is out there, because I've seen such a device in use. Did you try Newegg? Heck, you may even try Calling them.

[Trippy]

I have an issue similar enough to need the same information.  What would help me A LOT just at the moment is an adapter to connect a laptop disk to an IDE or USB port.  My crappy searches have turned up nothing so far.  Any tips?

You want something like this or that.

[Yegolev]

Thanks, Trippy.  My inability to drill down through menus is a discredit to the entire human species.  I just slam my open hands on the keyboard and grunt "Ware be de cables?"

[Venkman]

Ok, tried a bunch of things. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the hardware itself. Sectors look fine and all that. I even found a fix for the inability to boot from Safe Mode (got caught on AGP440.sys), and even that didn't change anything.

I've got both recommended suites above. I even went out and bought a HD enclosure to see if trying to manage this stuff when the drive was simply an external drive would be easier. That's actually when I finally confirmed the hardware seemed fine.

It won't boot to Windows. It won't mount as an accessible drive. It will recognize it in both cases, I just can't get to the pictures I want to move off this drive before wiping it out.

Maybe I can do this under the System Restore CD Miguel mentioned above? Trouble is, I'm completely lost under Linux, and the SystemRescueCD wiki at least assumes a working knowledge of it. Does that suit of tools let me:

1) Mount the drive
2) Access the files on that drive
3) Copy those files to another drive connected to USB

If so, what is the exact command I need to enter at root@sysresccd / %?

All I know how to do in Linux is hit "l" to list stuff, and type the commands that wiki or someone here tells me :)

[Trippy]

When you say "not accessible" do you mean you don't see an icon for the drive in My Computer or is it giving you some sort of error when you try to pull a file off of it? If it's the first thing, if you fire up Computer Management and go to Disk Management do you see the drive there?

[Venkman]

It'll load up as F: under My Computer. When I try to access it, itl'll say "Drive not Formated. Format?" So I say "No" :)

Admin Tools>Disk Management doesn't see that same drive.

The drive is in an external case connected via USB 2.0 (uses two USB slots, one for data and the other for power).

I'm running a "smart" recovery program on it now. I didn't think to do this sooner, but I did just get the enclosure. Managed to find a free one I'm giving a shot with first. If it works at all but not all the way, I'll pay the $49 for a real one :)

[Trippy]

It'll load up as F: under My Computer. When I try to access it, itl'll say "Drive not Formated. Format?" So I say "No" :)

Admin Tools>Disk Management doesn't see that same drive.

In Disk Management look down below on the right hand side where it lists Disk 0, Disk 1, etc. Do you see it there?

It sounds like there's something wrong with the disk data structures like the partition table or the Master File Table. You could try a disk recovery program like Spinrite to see if it can reconstruct the damaged/missing bits.

[Venkman]

Thanks. I'm having a bit of luck with PC Inspector (basically just Google'd stuff, found a PC World article on free recovery tools, and this one was actually fully free).

It's a bit kludged, like you can't set the starting nor ending sectors, and can only search for one type of file at a time. But where every other program failed to do anything, this one's pulling up every JPEG I ever had on the drive (that was my first priority: rezzing photos of my kids I hadn't archived yet... ironically what I was just starting to do when the drive crapped out). Dog slow though (it did warn me that the drive was too damaged to use the Fast method).

But it was also truly free. Other programs would either only do 64kb until you spent $80, or would scan the drive and require you pay them some wierd licensing fee to use their tech to recover them. I didn't come across Spinrite though, so as mentioned, that's next on my list if this one only does a partial job of it.

It'll probably take another 48 hours to go through all the sectors, but as long as it works it can take until Christmas for all I care.

[Sky]

Is it possible to boot Windows from an external drive? I was trying to get a nice external setup like I have for OSX and finally gave up on it. With OSX, I can boot off my firewire drive, make an image of a hard drive and then use that image to set up all the other computers. The ease of that really is one of the core reasons I dislike windows. I just tweak a couple things like ip and sharename, add security and I'm done, maybe twelve minutes total.

I know I could make things a bit easier with a slipstream for windows, I just don't have good hardware to set it up (no pcs with cd burners, for starts...though maybe I could do it on this mini).

I even like mac bsd better than windows, honestly.

[Trippy]

Is it possible to boot Windows from an external drive?

You can if your BIOS supports it. E.g. most newish motherboards support booting off any attached USB device which could be an external USB hard drive or even an USB thumb drive if you can squeeze Windows down that small.

[Ironwood]

Ok, tried a bunch of things. As far as I can tell, there's nothing wrong with the hardware itself. Sectors look fine and all that. I even found a fix for the inability to boot from Safe Mode (got caught on AGP440.sys), and even that didn't change anything.

Um.  The exact same thing has just started happening on one of my machines.  I wonder if summats going round or this is just a staggering coincidence.

Edited for non-laziness.