Re: data retrieval from a faulty laptop hard drive

puck wrote:

i need to access the my documents folder of a faulty hitachi laptop
drive.

When my Hitachi laptop drive went tits up recently I found the freeware
'NTFS Reader For DOS' recovered everything off the drive. But it all
depends on how the drive has failed. My drive was a WinXP installation
using NTFS file format.

For it to work the Hitachi has to be the main drive C: again, not via a
USB reader. You then need to boot from an external device and load DOS
(I used an external USB floppy drive) and then the NTFS reader (it's a
DOS program) from that floppy (it's small enough to fit on a floppy).

The only drawbacks are it's pretty damn slow (every time you change
directory it has to rescan the drive), and two, its biggest problem is
that it will only save recovered files in standard DOS 8.3 format, so
you have to keep track of the files real filename and rename it later
on, on another machine. Oh, and you need some sort of external device
to save the recovered files to (I used a 1Gb USB memory stick).

Other than that it worked perfectly and recovered every single thing
from the drive. Just took me two solid days to do it. And another day
renaming all the files back to their long file names.

The program can be found here:

http://www.ntfs.com/products.htm

Good luck, hope it works as well for you as it did me.

Regards

Mark
.