Busted Laptop Hard Drive : Caused by Virus?

[Heofz]

Evening chaps/chappettes, this may be a long post so please bear with me:

My father approached me with a problem, in the form of laptop which refused to load windows, whose hard drive contains a lot of precious data which he (in)conveniently has not backed up.

He remembers opening an email attachment and all of a sudden was bombarded with porn popups which would not stop coming, so he powered down his machine. From this point on, it would only ever reach the windows xp loading screen and then immediately throw a blue-screen error.

It even managed to get to the safe mode options menu however no matter which option was chosen the blue screen would still happen.

Tried reinstalling windows, but this didn't work (some random error I never saw before - 99% sure it was caused by the problem mentioned above), and for some reason the recovery console could not detect a windows installation at all.

I have since removed the laptop hard drive, bought a LaptopHD-to-ide adaptor and tried running data recovery software (GetDataBack™ NTFS - worked wonders for me in the past) on my own pc as the surrogate with this hard drive connected via IDE. When trying to examine the contents of the disk, GetDataBack would just freeze and cause my PC to blue screen.

I am stumped at the moment. Is there anything else I can try to get the data back off it?

The hard drive is a Fujitsu 40GB
Model MHR2040AT
Rev #: 5

Any help/advice would be muchly appreciated

 

[Heofz]

That route sounds very appealing indeed, if you're not too bothered helping me out I would very much like to give this a try

I do have some (well, very limited) experience with linux; I once installed mandrake dual boot on my pc once, didnt like how it performed and removed it shortly afterwards though!

But if this works I'll buy you a pint

 

[Heofz]

Thanks for the reply

I tried replying this morning but was unable to process the words in my brain due to the vast quantity of alcohol residing in my bloodstream

Here is what I have to work with:

• My PC is networked... wirelessly (Netgear WG311T wireless card)
• On the same network there are multiple PCs I can "C$-Share" in to dump files.
• There's probably maybe 10-20GB's of data to recover however I am not sure, will need to see
• Some of the data (assuming i can recover it of course) may be riddled with viruses, so I'll need to take precautions especially with .exe's etc
• I could juggle around some data to empty one of my partitions and format it in fat32 seeing as thats easier/faster than networking (especially as I'm using wireless)

I'm just downloading the ISO now, will get the fat32 partition ready. Is this boot cd easy to use?

 

[Heofz]

<snip>

I haven't dealt with linux command lines much but I've played around with Bash with a SSH a couple of years back.

I've added ** MSN from your trust, not sure if it has worked, do you wanna add mine?

Give it to PC World or someone

Of course it will cost you/Dad, but atleast they will get it working definitely and recover his stuff, if not, you don't pay them

lol PC world? I got a couple of mates who worked at PC world tech place, trust me you don't want to give them ANYTHING. tbh I'd much rather do this recovery myself than hand it over to somebody else. If anything were to happen to the hard drive I would just have to take their word for it but if I do it all myself I only have myself to blame. That's the way I like it