Help recovering data from crashed XP system.

Yes, I have an external hard drive. It died too. I'm thinking one of those online backup solutions is looking pretty good right about now. But, that doesn't help me today.

My system was blue screening. I did several repair installs. At one point it crashed during a repair install. Now when I try to do the install I get a message telling me that an install is in progress and do I want to continue or format and do a clean install? I tell it to continue, then it essentially jumps to the end of the install process. When it tries to boot to Windows it goes to the point when the little blue bars are going across the screen, then the screen goes black and the mouse pointer appears and that's it.

I can see the drive if I go into the recovery console, but once I'm in the recovery console I have no idea what to do.

I have some stuff on that computer that I really, really need to retrieve.

Is there somebody that can help me please? I can't afford the pay hundreds of dollars...money is kinda tight right now.

Got another PC that works somewhere? Slave that hard drive to it and you should be able to collect important files.

Than get a chalkboard and start writing "I will make regular back up of my important files" 1,000 times.

another alternative is this:

depending on media types you have, either install a bootable version of linux on a thumbdrive, or DvD.

use that to boot. mount your HDD in linux as a windows partition, then backup away as either usb, or dvd depending on media type that is available.

Any linux disto will do as a live-cd, but ubuntu is pretty easy to understand. as far as a fast, usb tumbdrive linux, i recommend DSL (Dam* Small Linux) as it is REALLY lightweight as an OS, and should be able to burn stuff to CD/dvd. you can also try DSL in a bootable .iso form which would work too, assuming you want to backup via usb.

I have a $20 device I got from newegg, it turns any SATA or PATA HD into and external HD... when I have bad drives that still work, i connect them to a working machine and remove files that way. If the drive is dead, nothing short of a good data recovery place can really help, and that can be big $$$. For the future, I highly recommend www.carbonite.com for online backup. There is no size limit, you can have 1000000TB in your machine, it will back it up. The catch? It will ONLY backup LOCAL drives, no USB HD's, SAN's NAS etc., etc. Good for me as I have 5 internal HD's, backs up everything, music, movies etc, etc.

What Stop error are you getting?

Might not be a bad HDD at all.

nikhsub1 said:

I have a $20 device I got from newegg, it turns any SATA or PATA HD into and external HD... when I have bad drives that still work, i connect them to a working machine and remove files that way. If the drive is dead, nothing short of a good data recovery place can really help, and that can be big $$$. For the future, I highly recommend www.carbonite.com for online backup. There is no size limit, you can have 1000000TB in your machine, it will back it up. The catch? It will ONLY backup LOCAL drives, no USB HD's, SAN's NAS etc., etc. Good for me as I have 5 internal HD's, backs up everything, music, movies etc, etc.

Click to expand...

Yeah they are a life saverand a lot better sweeping into another PC

I have this one
http://www.newertech.com/products/usb2_adaptv2.php

GOT IT!!!!! Thanks to those of you who responded.

Here's what I did, just in case someone, somewhere runs into the same problem.

I loaded Knoppix Linux 5.1 (MUST BE 5.1!!!!!!!!!) onto a USB drive. Here's a link to a concise explanation on what to do. Once that was done I booted from that drive and my RAID array was right there on the Desktop! FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!! A big thanks to you Linux guys for all your efforts!

This took me a long time to figure out and in the process I ran across some info about how the different Linux flavors handle RAID arrays. In the end, for this type of rescue operation, Knoppix 5.1 works best because it automatically loads the software that allows it to "read" the array. Then the coolest part is how it puts an icon right on the desktop and is readily accessible.

With Knoppix 6.0, for example, you have to manually load the RAID software (dmraid???), then do a bunch of command-line stuff. I'm not very good at that, and you can probably tell from my simplistic explanation of this whole ordeal that software is not my forte. Point being that it can be done with other types of Linux, but after my exhaustive investigation I found that Knoppix 5.1 is the easiest to use, and it will also fit on a 1GB drive with room left over to transfer files.

I hope this helps somebody.

One other thing, just out of curiosity...

Does anybody know where the file is located that tells the installer that a repair installation has already been started? I wonder if I could delete that file, then restart the repair install process again? Or, maybe it's just a switch in the registry?

I fully intend to format the drives and load my OS fresh, but I'm just curious about that.

Word is : A C R O N I S... google is ur friend...

xtreeme, telling someone to google without any further input isn't encouraged around here. Googling for it takes you here which isn't the most relevant result for what the threadstarter needs:
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/

Anyways, since you have the issue resolved, you may also want to try out dropbox in the future - it has limited space, but it's free and I use it to make sure my important files are safe. This works for me, because I'm not too worried about losing media files, those can always be replaced.

A few people posted in our referral thread, helps get you bonus space beyond the 2GB the system starts you with:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=621962

I.M.O.G. said:

xtreeme, telling someone to google without any further input isn't encouraged around here. Googling for it takes you here which isn't the most relevant result for what the threadstarter needs:
http://www.acronis.com/enterprise/

Anyways, since you have the issue resolved, you may also want to try out dropbox in the future - it has limited space, but it's free and I use it to make sure my important files are safe. This works for me, because I'm not too worried about losing media files, those can always be replaced.

A few people posted in our referral thread, helps get you bonus space beyond the 2GB the system starts you with:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=621962

Click to expand...

Ok I.M.O.G. - and thanks for deleting my post

My advice is : get hold of acronis true image home, get the habit taking a mirror of your hdd once a week. If you ever run into problems you have a perfect mirror at hand - just blow it back and you are good to go again.
This will cost you a extra hdd and the acronis program of course.

I have used this procedure since windows xp came out - and my original install date is from the very same year xp came. In the start I used ghost since acronis weren't released.

Good luck