BSOD and backing up HDD

HAz · 28 Jul 2007 at 09:54

My Toshiba laptop has decided to BSOD this morning!

Spoke to technical support and they said that even though the laptop won't load to desktop (BSOD and restarts just before the XP welcome screen) I can still back up the data on the HDD!

He said PC World can do it but is there any way I can do this myself?

Cheers.

Simmy · 28 Jul 2007 at 10:04

You need another working computer and an adapter in order to plug the laptop hard drive into the working machine. You can get 2.5" IDE to USB converters on eBay for £5-10 I think.

PC world will probably charge £60+ for this, so I would suggest you try it yourself

marc2003 · 28 Jul 2007 at 10:08

if you have an external usb drive, you can just boot from a linux live cd and copy the files across. ask in the linux section for recommendations on that....

Simmy · 28 Jul 2007 at 10:26

marc2003 said:
if you have an external usb drive, you can just boot from a linux live cd and copy the files across. ask in the linux section for recommendations on that....

Yep, that is another option. However the external drive will need to be FAT32, as last time I tried, linux only had some dodgy NTFS support which basically didn't work. Has that improved now?

marc2003 · 28 Jul 2007 at 10:34

Simmy said:
Yep, that is another option. However the external drive will need to be FAT32, as last time I tried, linux only had some dodgy NTFS support which basically didn't work. Has that improved now?

i haven't tried a live cd, but i installed the full version of ubuntu a few weeks back and the ntfs support was solid. i ran a webserver in linux for a week that was constantly writing/reading files from an ntfs partition and it was fine.