restoring XP or recovering data from notebook hard drive

[buckslayer80]

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Have you performed a repair install yet?

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he said he only has a Home disk and he has Pro installed on his machine. this wouldn't work, right?

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I missed that. But you're right, it probably won't work. However it only takes 5 minutes to find out. I'd give it a shot.

[jb9]

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However it only takes 5 minutes to find out. I'd give it a shot.

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Yeah, I will definitely try it.

I bought the adapter tonight but won't have time to try installing the hard drive in the PC until tomorrow night. Hopefully I can recover the data; then I'll put the drive back and see if I can restore XP.

I'll try the fixmbr/fixboot commands first to see if I can get XP to restart that way.

If that doesn't work, I'll try to do a repair using the XP Home disk.

If that doesn't work, it is possible the computer has a Dell restore feature hidden on a partition (link), but I don't remember seeing anything about this when I bought it.

If all else fails, I guess I reformat and install XP Home.

Unless it's a hardware problem, then I get a brand new computer [img]/images/graemlins/cool.gif[/img].

Thanks for the tips.

[goldtoes]

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If that doesn't work, it is possible the computer has a Dell restore feature hidden on a partition (link), but I don't remember seeing anything about this when I bought it.

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yes, you can easily find out if it has this feature by either looking at your manual that came with the PC or online. you could also tell by hooking it up to the other PC as a slave and going into My Computer and see if it has more than 1 drive letter. If it does, most likely one partition is reserved for the restore stuff.

[jb9]

I was able to salvage my data by connecting the laptop hard drive to a PC and copying everything over. I disconnected the CD-ROM drive in the PC and connected the laptop drive to that ribbon as it was easier than installing it as a 2nd hard drive.

I think I remembered to copy over everything I needed. No doubt I missed something, but I got all the real important stuff.

When I connected the drive to the PC, the PC ran chkdsk on the drive during boot up and found some damaged files and tried to recover them. Turns out the SYSTEM32 directory was damaged. The directory itself was missing, and most (possibly all) of the files from it turned up in the recovered files directory chkdsk made.

After transplanting the drive back to the Inspiron, I decided not to try the fixmbr or repair options, because I was fairly convinced that the computer had the Dell restore partition.

I was afraid trying to fix the boot record or repair XP pro with an XP home CD could damage that data, so I tried to activate the restore function first.

It worked and was very easy to do (aside from the fact that I had to find the information about how to do it on a non-Dell website).

It wiped the hard drive, and the OS and software were restored to the state they were in when I took it out of the box. I got a whole bunch of software to install and settings to adjust now, but it looks the machine is functional again.

But first, I think I'll backup all those files I copied to the PC to CD-ROM before this happens again. Some of those files are Wordperfect 5.1 files that once lived on 5.25" floppies and have now outlasted 5 computers. Hopefully they will outlast 5 more.

Thanks for the advice.

[goldtoes]

glad you got everything worked out!