Hi, Leo. My very dear aunt passed away this summer and I’ve been asked by
her family to try and retrieve her photos and any other important docs off of
her computer. However, when I start it up, I get to the Windows start up screen
and the PC immediately reboots. It’s an older Compaq machine running Windows
2000 Pro. I tried to start it in safe mode and got the same result. Granted, I
plugged in all of my user interface tools: keyboard, mouse, etc., which had
never been on this machine before. Any suggestions as to what to do would be
greatly appreciated. I understand that there are several years worth of
grandchildren photos on this PC and we’d really like to retrieve them. I’m
thinking my only option might be to crack open the case and pull out the hard
drive and put it into a docking station, but I don’t have one and I hate to buy
one if there’s a way around that.
In this excerpt from
Answercast #59, I look at two simple ways to access old pictures from a
computer that won’t boot.
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Data from an old machine
Well, actually, in your situation, it’s unclear what you mean specifically
by “docking station,” but what I’m going to recommend sounds very similar to
that.
If I were in your shoes, I would open the box, take out the hard drive, and
put it in external USB enclosure. They’re not that terribly expensive and
after you’re done (after you’ve gotten everything copied and appropriately
backed up), you’ve got a nice little external hard drive you can use for other
purposes.
Point being here that obviously, your aunt hadn’t been backing up. If the
pictures are only on that hard drive, then they haven’t been getting backed
up.
USB drive
So the thing to do is like I said, put it in an external drive. Make a USB
drive out of it. Connect it up to another computer and immediately start
copying all those files off.
Then, immediately start backing up. Those sound like pretty important
pictures. The scenario you’ve descried is actually incredibly common – where
people have someone who has passed away or who have left a computer behind
that has a problem or a computer on which is the only copy of something
important.
Most often, it is in fact photographs. That’s why I so frequently stress
the importance of backing up or making copies of things.
But a USB enclosure… it’s not going to be terribly expensive and it really
does sound like the quickest and most expeditious way to solve this
problem.
Boot from a Live CD
Now, if you really, really, really, really don’t want to do that, the other
approach that I would take would be to boot the machine from a Linux Live
CD.
Grabbing something like Ubuntu Linux (or any of the other Linux
distributions that supply what’s called a “Live CD”) will allow you to do two
things:
- It will allow you to boot the machine from the CD. That means
that nothing on the hard disk is required. The boot process will happen
entirely from the CD; it will load an operating system from the CD.
- There you’ll be able to run Linux’s file manager, explore the
hard drive, and presumably be able to see and copy off those precious
pictures.
You can install or insert a new external USB drive or some other device
(probably USB based) and then copy those pictures to that other device using
the Linux Live CD.
You’ll need that external drive, so it sounds like you’re gonna end up with
something like that anyway unless you’re willing to go through a lot of
copies with a flash drive that you already have.
But that’s the other approach. Basically, it’s to boot from something else
that allows you access to the hard drive, at which point you can copy
things.
Next from Answercast #59 – Why is all my email
downloading again after reinstalling Outlook?
Hi Leo,
I know you’re not the Linux expert, (neither am I!), but I am having trouble following your instructions for using a Linux live CD that you have mentioned several times in this and your other articles. Whenever I try to copy files to another drive, be it HDD or USB, I keep getting “access denied” when trying to write to the drive. I have tried both Ubuntu and other flavors of Linux, but get the same error. IT’s easy enough to mount existing partitions, but I am never asked for login credentials. Very annoying! What am I doing wrong?
Thanks for the great articles.
Is this an option for a laptop?
My oldest [86 years] and dearest friend has clogged up his trusty laptop with music tracks and too many photographs. Eventually it became impossible to boot and, to make matters worse, the laptop monitor cracked [I think in his frustration he attempted to teach it flying lessons!] so that I can’t do any diagnostics. I tried hooking up a remote monitor but his laptop screen settings needs adjusting – on screen… and no can do. He has photos which he would really like to recover so I’d be pleased to know if I can remove the hard drive and access as a remote [external] drive.
For those who have trouble dealing with Linux, I have an alternate suggestion.
1. Download the Macrium WinPE .iso from my Skydrive. {url removed -copyrighted program}
2. Burn the .iso to a CD – e.g. with ImgBurn
3. Load the system from the CD – you have to change the BIOS boot order to load from the CD.
4. Make an image of the partition that contains your files with Macrium on that CD and store that image on an external disk (USB stick is also possible if it is big enough).
5. Attach the disk with the image that you took to any running Windows system and mount the image which will result in a mounted VHD.
6. Now you can open that VHD in COMPUTER and copy your files.
If you are not familiar with Macrium, here is a tutorial: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/73828-imaging-free-macrium.html?ltr=I
@Bill
It’s not difficult to remove the hard drive from a laptop. It usually consists of removing 2 screws on the bottom of the laptop and 4 screws holding the drive in place. The HD enclosure is a different size than that of a desktop computer, and requires a 2.5″ enclosure.
A must have for everyone for such an eventuality is Hirens Boot DVD, It’s possible to boot up into a Mini XP or Win7, once into your chosen Mini OS you will have various software available for recovering your files from your unbootable hard drive to a USB or even to burn to a DVD.
I’m pretty sure it will handle a Win 2000 drive.
@ Joe F
In Linux you may need to “mount” the external drive in order to read/write to it.
Hi Everyone!
I actually submitted this question and I’m so thankful for the response! It took me a while to get the adapter I needed (shipping error… long story!), but I finally received it, pulled out the hard drive and hooked it up to my machine. It worked like a charm! All the pictures and other important documents have been removed, copied to a Seagate external drive and handed over to my cousins (my aunt’s daughters).
We are so thrilled to get these pictures off of this machine! Thank you so much to Leo for answering my question and for the great discussion that resulted.
Kara