Alright computer people, I am in need of your help. My wife's OLD laptop has finally keeled over it seems. However, she wants all of her stuff off of the hard drive and I can't figure out how to do this for her. I'd rather not spend money at a Geek Squad type place just for them to tell me that the hard drive is fried so I'm coming to TWW for opinions.

Its an old Dell laptop running Windows Vista. A couple weeks ago, just out of the blue, she tried to turn it on. It would load the Dell screen where you could hit F2 for Setup or F8 for the diagnostic screen. Then, it would go to the screen where it should be loading windows, but all it would have is the loading bar at the bottom. No Windows logo or anything. Once past that, all it would show is a black screen and a cursor that I could move. It does the same thing if I try to load it in Safe Mode. Any help? Any experience? I'm all ears.

3/17/2014 8:17:25 AM

You have a few options depending on a few things about the laptop itself and what you ultimately want to do with it.

What's the manufacturer and model of the laptop? Do you have another laptop or desktop, and which specifically?f


If you have no interest in getting the laptop to run again, I'd pull the drive from it, hook it up to another computer and try to pull the files off of it.

You can get a 2.5 laptop drive to 3.5 desktop adapter for a few bucks. If your only option is another laptop, you can get an external drive enclosure with a usb cable. It will be a little more, but not a lot. And you can still use it as an external drive after you get everything straightened out (assuming the drive itself isn't bad).

If you want the laptop, you could do the same thing, but then format the drive and re-install the operating system fresh. Or, you could try to resolve the issue before doing that. But I'd probably just copy the files and wipe it clean.

[Edited on March 17, 2014 at 7:46 PM. Reason : .]

3/17/2014 7:44:26 PM

Don't care to keep the laptop. It's old and crappy. There are just some files, pictures, etc. that I would like to get off of it

3/17/2014 8:19:23 PM

I'd take it out and put it in an external enclosure like this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8044198&CatId=2781

or

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1042924&CatId=2782

The reason I asked for the model number of the laptop is so I could tell you if it's a SATA or IDE drive.

I'd go with an enclosure since you'll get a useable external drive when you're done.

3/18/2014 12:04:05 PM

^So if I pulled it out, and put it in one of those enclosures, and plug it into my desktop...I should be able to pull the files off of the drive?

What if the drive is corrupted and that's the reason the laptop won't load?

3/18/2014 1:12:07 PM

unless there is a massive HW failure, you'll be able to get your documents from the HDD. It's unlikely the entire/enough of the drive is corrupt to prevent you from getting the documents. Now, some of those documents may lie in bad sectors so you'll lose those few. And that's the idiot tax for not having them backed up.

just get the proper enclosure (IDE or SATA), insert the old drive, connect to working computer via USB and drag/drop.

[Edited on March 18, 2014 at 1:58 PM. Reason : .]

3/18/2014 1:57:21 PM

Nevermind

[Edited on September 3, 2015 at 12:02 PM. Reason : ets]

9/3/2015 11:57:40 AM

ok, bought the enclosure, plugged the harddrive into it, plugged it into my desktop and heres what i'm dealing with:

Two separate drives are showing up. One is called "RECOVERY (E" and I am able to access it. The other is called, "OS (F" and has "NTFS" written underneath it. I am not able to access it. Everytime I click it to open it, i get a status saying, "F: is not accessible. Access is denied." Now this harddrive is from an old 2008 laptop that was running Windows XP i believe. The files on the "Recovery" drive don't seem to be anything that is of use to me from what I can tell. It seems that I need to get into the OS (F drive somehow, I'm just not sure how or if its possible. Any help would be appreciated.

9/7/2015 2:21:50 PM

Right click on the drive and go into security. You should be able to take ownership of the drive or give yourself permissions to access it or something along those lines.

Recovery partition is worthless for what you're trying to do.

9/7/2015 9:37:41 PM