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Recovering data from non-booting Win 2000 laptop - any ideas?

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Recovering data from non-booting Win 2000 laptop - any ideas?
Hi All

Trying to recover address book from a totally crashed machine. Computer store tech says that the hard drive is toast. Windows won't start.

- Sony laptop
- Win 2000 Pro
- error while booting is "missing or corrupted SYSTEMced"

Would anyone know how to recover data with this?

What I was thinking is that perhaps the hard drive could be pulled, and then change the jumpers so that the laptop drive is just for data, and then hook it up as a data drive on a desk top to see if at least the files can be searched.

Sound reasonable?

Thanks Smile

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Last edited by:

DogTags: Sep 24, 2003, 5:26 PM
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Re: [DogTags] Recovering data from non-booting Win 2000 laptop - any ideas? In reply to
Really depends on whether or not the hard drive is functional or not. Hard to say what the actual problem is. It could be that your hard drive has completely died, in which your solution wouldn't work. It could be a filesystem problem, again, your solution wouldn't work, but a chkdsk of it might fix it. Also, to do what you wanted to do would require a special convertor to use the drive on a desktop system.

Adrian
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Re: [DogTags] Recovering data from non-booting Win 2000 laptop - any ideas? In reply to
Generally laptop drives don't have the same interface as PC drives so my guess is that it wouldn't work. It's been a while since I have worked on laptops though and when I did it was IBM Thinkpads. I know they used to make adapters that you could plug the laptop drives into to interface with a PC though. That might be worth checking into.

You can always try to find a data recovery specialist in your area but they are not cheap. I guess it depends on how much your data is worth to you.

Good luck.

~Charlie
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brewt and Chaz In reply to
Thanks very much. This is for a friend. I'm hoping that he can save his addys. It's for his business.

Much appreciated Smile

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