Help with almost dead laptop?

[Geekling]

My cousin's laptop pretty much died on her awhile back. It won't boot past this screen. She's hesitating with the idea of reformatting the HD due to the fact that she has all of her sons childhood pics on it. I've tried using the windows cd to repair with no luck, I've tried using a linux live CD to copy the files on to a USB thumbdrive. No luck. It won't let me write to NTFS. I'm downloading another version that will hopefully support NTFS.

Any idea/suggestions?

 

[Wik]

Tried Safe Mode? Tried booting to Recovery Console? Rebuilding Registry?

 

[Geekling]

Safe mode failed. I tried recovery mode to rebuild the boot sector. I'll try again for the registry.

 

[spherrod]

How about investing in a USB caddy for a laptop hard drive? Not expensive and then you can copy the data onto another machine before reformatting.

 

[aceO07]

Originally posted by: spherrod
How about investing in a USB caddy for a laptop hard drive? Not expensive and then you can copy the data onto another machine before reformatting.

Yup, I agree. Probably cost $10-15 for the external case. Then you can hook it up to another computer and copy the data.

If it's a physical problem with the drive, trying to access it more might make it worse.

 

[Noema]

Which Linux distro did you try?

I once extracted several dozen GBs worth of data from a friend's laptop, which had been compromised by malware to the point of not even booting in safe mode, with an Ubuntu 6.10 live CD and my iPod.

Being able to write NTFS is irrelevant because you are writing on the USB thumbdrive, which is probably formated to FAT32 (most are anyway, at least in my experience). You just need to mount the Windows partition in Ubuntu; it's quite easy and the instructions can be found here.

Easier than prying the laptop open to get the hard drive The USB caddy however is an excellent long term invesment that should be in every geek's tool box

 

[Geekling]

Thanks for the info guys...

But I got it to boot to the login screen. Apparently the laptop hasn't worked for over a year and she can't remember the password . I've found a few tricks to get it. I just need to work on it. I've tried Orphcrack but it tells me the LM has is empty please try the NT tables.

I'll try using the windows CD next. Boot to the coping files screen and hit shift+f10 to open command.