Question

Hi there,

My DELL Vista laptop is bust and I need a utility cd to boot from that can copy from my file system to an external harddrive that i plug into the laptop

I tried KNOPPIX and BartPE and although i can see my file system using KNOPPIX and open files successfully, copying was unsuccessful. I think there is something wronge with the CD to be honest, it's old. I should try download the new version again and try it

Just though I'd ask here first if anyone can recommend something?

Answer 1

Your hard drive is easily removed from your Dell laptop. The method to remove the drive is different from model to model, but Dell usually offers maintenance manuals. The easiest way is to Google your model name/number (mine is Inspiron 1501) and "service" or "maintenance".

As mentioned above, once you have the drive removed, you can purchase an external enclosure for the drive. Hard drive laptops are 2.5" (standard PCs are 3.5"). NewEgg has 143 different enclosures to choose from. The easiest and most common type would be one with a USB port, allowing you to hook it up to another computer.

The nice thing is, once you have the enclosure, you can keep it around for future use, or even buy a new hard drive for your laptop and use the old one in the enclosure as portable storage.

Answer 2

As suggested in another Super User question (which I cannot find now) Your best bet is to buy an enclosure for <£5, and plug your hard drive in to it, then copy files to another computer.

It is the quickest way to proceed.

That being said, you said your laptop is "bust" however as you tried to use a live CD, the problem may be with the hard drive itself. You can always try the freezer trick as last resort, but you may actually be out of luck.

Answer 3

It should like you have some bad sectors on your hard drive. You might try SpinRite, it fixes things more often then it doesn't. I've had a lot of success of breathing life into "dead" hard drives. At least long enough to get the data off of it.

You can get SpinRite here: http://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

The guy who sells it has a 100% money back guarantee if you don't like it since there is no trial version available. It's probably worth it if you have critical data on your drive.

Answer 4

If your willing to tinker with hardware (a little), I would advice moving the Disk to an enclosure or buy a handy little tool like this: http://tekgems.com/Products/tg-usb-sata-ide-25-35.htm

And there is some evidence (on the NET) that cooling (freezing) a disk may temporarily make it more readable. Be careful about moisture, pack in plastic, with something that absorbs water (silica or dry rice).