Re: recover data from system that won't boot

tom wrote:
my Dell Inspiron B130 laptop (windows XP) won't boot. I don't want to lose some data on it. I want to either reinstall the OS without reformatting, or save the data before I reformat and reinstall.

I can boot from the Dell recovery CD's but I don't see how to get data off the machine. Network, CDROM and USB drives don't seem to be available.

Is there a way to turn them on?

Would a 3rd party tool help? I tried Ultimate Boot CD but none of it's routines worked (they hung). Am thinking of Active@BootDisk and Eddie Maintenance.

Thanks for your ideas.

I was able to boot using the System Rescue CD (Linux) which I highly recommend, if you are familiar with Linux. I was able to mount the NT filesystem and a USB drive and save the data. It connected to the internet too.

Then I reinstalled Windows XP from the Dell Recovery CD.
It turned out there *is* a "repair" option to install Windows without reformatting, but it is confusingly under the option "install windows" not the "recover" option.
I did a fresh install and reformatted since the data was saved.
The only problem was after the installation finishes, the wireless network wizard is available and lets you set up a network, but nothing happens and it does not appear in Network Connections. I needed to run the Driver CD as well, a confusing process for a first timer. After I installed a bunch of drivers including the wireless card driver (2 times) it found the network and worked.
In the Help for the Driver CD there is a list of what order to install the drivers. It is mostly the order they are listed in the first tab displayed ('My Computer' I think) but there are differences.




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