Accessing files without booting windows?

Rebelius · 24 Apr 2007 at 13:07

Ok, so my flatmate's laptop's Hard Drive is broken and there's an essay on there she'd rather no rewrite. Dell have said they'll send out a new hard drive, but that won't help get the file back.

The Hard Drive's IDE and it appears to be a different size of connector to desktop IDE drives, so I can't plug it into the PC. It's NTFS formatted so an Ubuntu live CD can't read it I don't think.

I tried the recovery console thing on the Windows disk but it doesn't seem to be able to access C:\Document and Settings

Attempting to boot into windows just gives something like unknown hard error, then something about ...system32/drivers/ntdll.dll

It's running chkdsk -r at the moment but taking ages and I don't know if it will help.

Any Ideas?

zetec452 · 24 Apr 2007 at 13:24

BartPE will probably work.

Amp34 · 24 Apr 2007 at 13:26

I think you can buy laptop drive adaptors so it can be plugged into a standard IDE socket. You ay then be able to acces the disk from the PC and copy the file from there, depending of course on how the disk is damaged.

Rebelius · 24 Apr 2007 at 13:41

JonRohan said:
BartPE will probably work.

thanks, that's the kind of thing I was looking for. trying that now.

I'd rather not have to buy an adaptor. She bet me the dishes that I couldn't get the file back and there's loads of them!

edit: BartPE worked - thanks very much