Drat - Windows crash and no windows backup install disks

[kblackav8or]

Well here I am 9000 miles from home and the wife's T42P decides to hard crash windows. No troubleshooting remotely has helped so here is the plan.. I ordered a new hard drive, should be there in a few days. In the meantime we are trying to save the data off the old one. Bought a hard drive caddy and are trying to get it to load up so we can copy the data off. The Fujitsu 80gb drive will spin up but won't recognize. What the computer does with the drive installed is tries to load but keeps getting into a reboot loop, won't finish loading safe mode or anything really. Something is corrupted. Question: how do we get the old drive to be accessible in a hard drive caddy so we can recover the data? Next step after that is to reinstall, let it go through the recovery process and then after it is up and working, build the windows backup install disks we failed to do.

[Brad]

If the drive is not recognized there may be no way to do what you want. There are data recovery specialists happy to attempt a recovery.

You may have to implement your backup plan.

Brad

[rbena]

If you can't boot from the original drive, two options would be to access it via a USB external enclosure, or via the 2nd hdd adapter module for your Thinkpad.

I've had instances where a suspect hard drive could not be accessed in a USB enclosure, but was able to be accessed via the 2nd hard drive adapter.

Also, if there is a corrupt MBR or the data files and partitions are not accessible, I've had very good recovery success using "PC Inspector File Recovery".