my laptop crashed, how hard is data recovery on my own?

Question

my wife's laptop crashed with what i believe is a serious virus but she has pictures of her grandmother on there that are no where else, hence she wants to save them via data recovery.
i have gotten some pretty pricey quotes and i was wondering if it was something i can do myself via software or hardware or both

Answer 1

If the drive is still in working condition, you can simply attach it as a secondary drive or via an external USB housing to a working computer and copy any files that are visible (even if it the OS doesn't boot, the data files may be fine) If there's corruption of the file allocation tables, utilities like Norton (or the freeware ones suggested earlier) may be able fix things enough for you to retrieve files, but could make matters worse in their attempts.

The best drive utility software on the market is Spinrite- give it a try if files aren't readable when the drive is connected to another machine.

If the drive has failed physically, recovery isn't guaranteed and can be very expensive- most professional data recovery services run in the thousands, as they primarily handle jobs for government and corporate clients. But on the bright side they can sometimes dredge data from drives that don't even spin.

Answer 2

Have you tried to restart your computer in safe mode? Try it first. To enter safe mode, you have to press F8 before you see the black screen with the Windows XP logo.


If your hard drive is formatted FAT32, then data recovery will be easy in case safe mode doesn't work. Get a Windows 98 boot disk and start the computer from that. Rename the folder "Documents and Settings" to OLDDOC. Rename the folder "Program Files" to OLDPRG. Delete the Windows folder, and then you're ready to reinstall Windows XP. There's no need to recover data. It's not lost. All you have to do is reinstall Windows XP. If the virus didn't format the hard drive or didn't delete your documents, then there's no reason why you should talk about data recovery. All you got to do is reinstall the OS. Be careful though, when you reinstall Windows XP, it will delete the "Documents and Settings" folder, so if you did not rename this folder to OLDDOC prior to reinstalling Windows, then you can say goodbye to your photos.

Ok. So, once you have reinstalled Windows, then you can go into your OLDDOC folder. Find your photos and move all your photos from there into a safe place. They should all be there.

Good luck. And don't panic. Viruses nowadays are not that evil. They used to be really evil 10-15 years ago. Nowadays most of them only do minor damage such as destroy your OS, but then you can reinstall it and start anew.

Answer 3

Well if its a software crash, you can try downloading knoppix linux onto a cd and boot from that. That way itll show you all the files on the computer without windows. Then e-mail the pictures to yourself. This is what I did a machine only an hour ago. The knoppix linux cd is avail at a site called distrowatch. It will boot the computer from the cd but yet show you the hard drive, also a good program to use to get around those pesky passwords. ; )

LOL, I'm catching up to you cirric

Answer 4

that's going to be a bite of cake - previous formed cut back/paste/replica in case you employ a flashdrive particularly of a CD. I switched from CDs to flashdrive through convenience of doing so and the fees are coming way down. right here, our Sunday paper contains classified ads from place of work Depot, place of work Max, Circuit city, and ultimate purchase. All have flashdrives - like 1gb for $9.ninety 9. No formatting needed, no burning - in basic terms plug and bypass (in the journey that your living house windows is as much as date). WindowsXP could have the motive force for any flashdrive you purchase and if no longer, this is fairly downloaded from the producer's website. you probable could have some exterior storage besides. Your computer ought to crash at any time and additionally you would be left with no longer something.

Answer 5

I'd first try putting it in another PC to allow the computer a chance to look at the files. The adapter for laptop to PC can be found at Newegg. Recovery software is likely available at softpedia.com, majorgeeks.com, cnet and zdnet.com. See what others say about it. Good luck.

Answer 6

Hi. One solution is to add an external drive (USB based) and install your OS to that. Boot from the external drive and whatever files are intact on your internal drive should be visible. This will also give you a good means to backup all important files, always a good thing.