It's a sad day when you drop your Laptop

KingMoo

now it won't get past the windows loading screen when booting up.

I can take it in to work to get them to replace it, but I really need to get some stuff off the hard drive or they might think that I use my laptop for oh-so-too-personal use.

How can I access the hard drive info? I have other computers and lots of cables if that helps

Etch

Maybe remove the hard drive and put it in another computer as a slave drive.

powerss

Get an external enclosure for your HDD, pop the laptop HD into it, then connect it to preferably a Mac.

You'll be able to see everything!

KingMoo

thanks.

what is an "HDD"?

Rook

KingMoo wrote: »

thanks.

what is an "HDD"?

Hard Disk Drive

Daedalus

powerss wrote: »

Get an external enclosure for your HDD, pop the laptop HD into it, then connect it to preferably a Mac.

You'll be able to see everything!

If he connects it to a Mac, he won't be able to modify anything because it's in (presumably) NTFS. He'll need to connect it to a Windows 2000/XP/Vista machine.

Pheezer

The Warlock wrote: »

powerss wrote: »

Get an external enclosure for your HDD, pop the laptop HD into it, then connect it to preferably a Mac.

You'll be able to see everything!

If he connects it to a Mac, he won't be able to modify anything because it's in (presumably) NTFS. He'll need to connect it to a Windows 2000/XP/Vista machine.

Completely untrue. OS X can mount an NTFS drive under read only, but they won't be able to write to it. They can read/write FAT32 drives.

The suggestion that it would need to be connected to a mac however is stupid and unnecessary and if I catch those sort of shenanigans again powerss can expect an infraction for it.

Arch Guru XX

If you have an IBM Thinkpad hit the 'Access IBM' button during attempted bootup and use the utility to transfer files via USB. I recommend using an iPod or something else large and just copying everything you can; this totally saved my ass once.

Otherwise I think your best bet is mounting the drive as a slave in a desktop PC; you can pick up a conversion kit at Comp USA (or other electronics stores) that will give you the cable adaptors that let you hook up a laptop HDD in a desktop (the different sizes mean different connectors). The kit should only run you a couple of bucks.

embrik

If it'll boot off of a CD, consider something like the Trinity Rescue Kit which is one of my new favorite Linux boot CDs. When you pop the disc in, you can set it to fileshare your drives using Samba so that you can remotely grab files from it over the network. It can do some chkdsk-type work as well. There's even more it can do, but I'll let the website explain if you're interested (especially since some of the more in-depth stuff isn't really for the uninitiated)