Hard Disk Recovery

alan4cult

My Windows XP installation has become corrupt and the recovery cd is failing to repair it. I need to get access to the files on the hard disk in order to remove them before I reformat. Any suggestions as to which bootable recovery method I should use. Some Linux Live CD distros don't allow me to access my hard drive.

Help?

mukki

i do this a few times a week and this has to be the easiest and safest way

1)remove the drive and plug it into a second working xp pc probably best to use a usb -> your drive type adapter
2)boot the pc in safe mode
3)log in as administrator
4)add an account with administrator rights (not the administrator account) as owner of the documents and settings folders and its sub folders (on your drive not the C: drive)
5)give it about 20mins to complete
6)reboot the pc and log into the account from step 4
7) install synctoy
8) make a folder on the c: drive
9) run sync tool and synchronise the documents and settings folder with the new folder on c:


steps 1,2,3,4 and 5 will give you rights to view all your old files
steps 6,7,8 and 9 will copy over every possibal file, and give you a log of the files that couldn't be copied

anthony4335

ubunto, will allow you access as far as I know. did not know that safe mode trick nice one.

Spunj

I have a bunch of tools I use but the one I turn to first and the one that gets the job done 99% of the time is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BartPE

You do need some files from your Windows install CD, and can slipstream in a bunch of external tools, but once it's built it really works.

martin84

As the last poster said Bart's PE builder is very good. What ya can do is install a recovery tool called getdataback NTFS/FAT as a plugin. Excellent addition to have on the cd.
Good video tutorial here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0reKK2ASEaU