Laptop hard drive help please

[Gaille]

Help!

I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro laptop, early this week it was working fine, then we had some kind of a power cut & it crashed.

When I re-booted it it wouldnt load windows, just kept looping & saying there was an error.

Dad had a hard drive that we have managed to put in the computer & its working fine now................
My problem is - it was due to be backed up this week (i do it every week or so) and there is info on the hard drive I would REALLY like to retrieve

Anyone got any ideas if it would be possible to try & retrieve it?

Dad has several disk drive readers, but we have neither of us ever tried this before, we are both more 'desktop' computer minded than laptop so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Gaille

[downside]

It sounds like  the Security (SAM) section of your registry has become corrupt and NTFS file systems will not let you gain access once security has been compromised.  I'm assuming that you are going into safe mode and when you select Last Known Good it just reboots instead of loading Windows?

If you have a Windows installation disk then you should be able to boot from that disk and go into Recover Console.  You may need to 'recover' Windows by partially reinstalling it.  Providing you do not reformat the hard drive it should not remove your data.  In theory it will overwrite C:\Windows and remove quite a lot of folders in C:\Documents and Settings but My Documents should be safe.

If you do not have a Windows installation disk then there may be other things you can try.  If you have a Linux LiveCD then you can boot from that and mount the Windows partition to check all the files are there.  You can then copy filles from the Windows partition to a USB drive.

[Herts Heart]

Attempting to interpret your post ................

Power cut? Affecting (corrupting) the laptop? Don't think so.

You have replaced the original hard drive? (with another?) (and (re-)installed Windows on the replacement?)

So you have the original hard drive now out of the laptop? (and the laptop is working ok but no data?)

It is no use trying to run anything on a replacement HDD if it (the original) is not in the machine.
Recovery will not run because nothing is there.

If the "backup" (one ore more) is on the original HDD then buy a caddy (install it in the caddy) and connect via usb on  the laptop. If you have a desktop that is another option.

I think that you need to be more specific on what has occurred and what you actually did.

[corieltauvi]

Which version of Windows do you have - XP, Vista or 7.
What was the error message that came up before it started looping?
It might be possible to repair the Windows installation.

Regards
Torven

[corieltauvi]

BTW if you can get a external hard drive caddy (probably a 2.5" one as it's a laptop) then you should be able copy your files to the new hard drive. If it can't read it then try http://www.piriform.com/recuva as a basic data recovery tool (free).

Good luck with it. 

Torven

[Gaille]

thanks for the replies, but this is a 2 year old post !

the laptop ended up at a friendly computer shop who managed to retrieve the data from the fried drive n only charged me £30 for a days work - I was very impressed!

apparently the whole area had a power surge and unfortunately for me the power seemed to cause some kind of error in the drive and it corrupted it (no idea what or how n I didn't ask I was just happy to have my data back!)

thanks for the advice :-)

Gaill

[[Ray]]

It just shows how willing and helpful Rootschatters (who kindly provide the advice) really are.

"thanks for the replies, but this is a 2 year old post !"


...... best to sign it off as complete?