PC Laptop - want to salvage files

[X-ray]

I have a friend's laptop here. It is an Acer Travelmate (TM222X). She has attempted to install another OS on it: the sticker on the back says it came with XP and she tried to install 98 on it. Anyway it now boots straight to a 98 setup wizard and the only other option is to shutdown if the details are not entered. Now I can only assume that the installation cannot continue because she doesn't have the original disk. That's why the machine doesn't boot anymore.
That's not my problem and I am not going to try to fix it but what I would like to do is try to get her photos off the hard-disk and backed up onto a CD so she can reinstall the XP. What I thought of doing is taking the drive out of the laptop and connecting it as a slave to my desktop. Is this feasible? Are there any pitfalls? I know I have to jumper the drive as slave, but what else do I need to do?

[adolescent]

Moving the drive is probably the best thing to do.  You'll need to buy a 2.5" to 3.5" IDE adapter to connect it to your desktop.

[Doobrey]

X-ray wrote:
 What I thought of doing is taking the drive out of the laptop and connecting it as a slave to my desktop. Is this feasible? Are there any pitfalls? I know I have to jumper the drive as slave, but what else do I need to do?

I can't see why it wouldn't work in theory. I just hope the drive was partitioned and she kept her data separate from the OS partition.
'Cos I dunno what the Win98 would have done to it, apart from change the filesystem from NTFS to FAT32 ( and probably formatted it along the way ??)

Atleast with Win98 being a smaller than XP it shouldn't have overwritten anything except the old XP system files


Anyhoo.. the first thing that you must do, is use something like Norton's Ghost to make a drive image, and if possible try and recover the files from a copy of that image.

[X-ray]

Thanks for fast replies dudes...I will see what I can do but if this 2.5 to 3.5 adapter is pricey, I'll not go much further here. She's on her own then.

[doctorq]

I have just ordered one myself, as I have to do the same myself. Cost me 5 UKP, so not that expensive.

I hope I will be able to salvage the drive using my A4000 though. Hoping I formatted with FAT back then, fingers crossed.

[bloodline]

Get a Knoppix live CD, and a USB Harddrive. Boot the machine with Knoppix, and copy the data from the Machine's internal drive to the USB drive :-)

[Cyberus]

yep, yep, yep

[X-ray]

@ Bloodline

You are the mutt's nuts, my good man. I am downloading Knoppix Live as we speak. Should take me 50 minutes at 233kb/s. I already have an external USB/Firewire drive and I'll see what I can do. (I'm absolutely clueless about Linux and Knoppix, so this could be interesting).

[Rooster]

Knoppix looks pretty hot

My suggestion was going to be for you to buy an external usb/firewire enclosure (roughly $20 US)..  These allow you to create a portable 2.5 laptop drive into a portable drive..  However, I'm all about the free solutions, and if Knoppix will read your files fine, then there's no need to go that route..

I'm going to throw something else out there, though...  If she overwrote XP with 98, there's a good chance in order for her to do that she wiped the drive..  I haven't done it lately, lol, but I thought I recalled reading that XP wouldn't let you "downgrade/downrev" to an older OS..  Could be way off, but.. Something to think about..  Especially considering XP generally uses NTFS filing system, which is incompatitable with win9x, I believe....

[Cyberus]

@ X-ray
http://db.ilug-bom.org.in/Documentation/knowing-knoppix_2004-12-30.pdf

@Rooster

I was thinking the same thing.
Unless, which is a slim chance, the drive had a separate FAT32 data partition.

Perhaps there are recovery tools that could be used anyway?

[bloodline]

X-ray wrote:
@ Bloodline

You are the mutt's nuts, my good man. I am downloading Knoppix Live as we speak. Should take me 50 minutes at 233kb/s. I already have an external USB/Firewire drive and I'll see what I can do. (I'm absolutely clueless about Linux and Knoppix, so this could be interesting).

You'll have no problem with Linux, it boots into a standard Desktop and you'll pick it up in about 4 seconds. I've used Knoppix and my USB drive a few times to save valuble data from dead windows laptops.  

But if she's formated the drive, it's probably game over.

[X-ray]

@ Cyberus

Ta for manual  :-)

@ Thread

This bird better be hoping and praying.

[X-ray]

Well, I have the Knoppix ISO downloaded and I have burned it to CD. Now...I changed boot order in BIOS to CD first, and the CD boots and I get the Knoppix screen with 'Press enter to boot from CD'. There is quite a bit of CD activity after that but then nothing. Black screen. This happens on my XP desktop with 2gb of RAM, even if I select the option of load all to RAM. Tried the CD on the laptop: same deal. Black screen. I am looking for clues online and in the manual but so far I don't know what the problem is  :-?

[bloodline]

X-ray wrote:
Well, I have the Knoppix ISO downloaded and I have burned it to CD. Now...I changed boot order in BIOS to CD first, and the CD boots and I get the Knoppix screen with 'Press enter to boot from CD'. There is quite a bit of CD activity after that but then nothing. Black screen. This happens on my XP desktop with 2gb of RAM, even if I select the option of load all to RAM. Tried the CD on the laptop: same deal. Black screen. I am looking for clues online and in the manual but so far I don't know what the problem is  :-?

It does take a while to boot... but you should see the usual *nix console during boot...

[Merc]

X-ray wrote:
Well, I have the Knoppix ISO downloaded and I have burned it to CD. Now...I changed boot order in BIOS to CD first, and the CD boots and I get the Knoppix screen with 'Press enter to boot from CD'. There is quite a bit of CD activity after that but then nothing. Black screen. This happens on my XP desktop with 2gb of RAM, even if I select the option of load all to RAM. Tried the CD on the laptop: same deal. Black screen. I am looking for clues online and in the manual but so far I don't know what the problem is  :-?

I've had the same problem with the last couple of Knoppix versions on more than one machine...  maybe try an older version if you can find one.