hard disk data recovery

from Elemental Forums

there's this xp box of my relative that has sort of died.

 

basically it had some sort of infection and when winxp booted up it just slow to a crawl. when booting up a livecd antivirus, it mentioned some sort of hdd issue, nonetheless it looked cleaned. however, it was still crawling speed, for example when attempting to access files in the hdd from a livecd.

 

apparently i screwed up some bootup files or some such after a few hard reset too many during/after the cleaning process when things just freezes. and it won't boot into xp anymore.

so my plan is to take another hdd, slap ubuntu on it as os, open up a new partition as data drive. then attempt to clone the dead hdd and then try to extract data from it. mainly just some old school photos or some such, i'm told.

 

never done this before.. does it sound reasonable? going to try Trinity Rescue Kit and see what happens.

35,586 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from WinCustomize Forums Top

Simplest solution is to open up the computer...remove the drive and attach it to your machine.  Use your OS to access it and offload the files/photos....;)

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

um... but since it ground to a halt when accessing folders when booted from livecd, won't it ground to a halt if i stick it on my machine too? i don't know what it has, so don't want it anywhere my machine XD

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Reply #3 from WinCustomize Forums Top

If booting the XP box is a problem, download BartPE here:  http://download.cnet.com/BartPE-Bootable-Live-Windows-CD-DVD/3000-2094_4-10611131.html

and boot using it. I would suggest booting it and installing Kaspersky Internet Security Trial edition (and Malwarebytes: http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html) which will scan and remove malware if possible. If the Kaspersky can't do it, and even if it does, I would run the Malwarebytes as well. Frequently one will not get all the stuff that might be there.

Then I would recommend running sfc /scannow as an administrator (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310747) which means opening cmd.exe using a right click and 'run as administrator') in order to try and repair damaged windows system files. You might need the Windows XP installation disk for that process to complete successfully.