Can I move files?

I am working on an acquaintance's computer that will not boot past BIOS. The computer has one hard drive with Vista Home Premium 64-bit installed. I have hooked the HD up to a computer with XP installed to see if I could see the files. The file structure is intact and the hard drive passed diagnostic tests, which leads me to believe that it is a boot file that is causing the problems. I have the Recovery Disks that came with the system and another set that was created shortly after the computer was bought. I realize that I'll have to use them, but the downside isthat the hard drive will have to be formatted in the process.

My question is, "Is there a way to save the contents of the hard drive (programs, files, settings, etc)?" My guess is that cloning is out since I can't get into Vista. Or could I clone the drive while it was hooked up to my XP system? If I copied all of the files to DVDs, could I copy all the files back to the reinstalled OS?

You can save to files yes.
But Vista and programs no.
While you have to drive hooked up to the other computer
save the files. Pix,Vids Music and other stuff.

There is one thing you can try if you have the vista disc.
Has to be the OEM disc.
You can put it into the Xp comptuer and look though it and find the boot file
and copy it to the drive with vista on it.

Hope I did not confuse you to much. I am not very good
at explaining things.

Good-Luck.

Jimmy

Thanks for the response, it wasn't confusing at all.

Exploring the Recovery (slash installation) Disk shows Boo.mgr (not boot) on the main window and two files, BCD and Boot.sdi, in a folder named Boot. Would any of those files be useful?

You can read this http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/204930-bootmgr-missing.html?ltr=B
It might help.

Jimmy

Thanks for the link.

After looking at the hard drive some more, I'm not sure if I need to go that route. When I put the hard drive into my XP system and look at it through My Computer, I find 2 logical drives for the hard drive. The first is 48.8 GB, with 17.2 GB free. In this drive, I find what looks like a Windows OS, but everything looks like a fresh install (complete with bloatware). There are no music files or pictures (other than samples), no program files that would be installed after an installation (like Acrobat, etc), and the user names are Administator, Default, and Public. Granted, I'm not sure what the computer is used for, but it does look like an unused copy of Windows.

The second drive is 9.76 GB with 9.68 GB free. The only folders in this drive are Recycler and System Volume Information.

When I look at the hard drive in Disk Management, though there is 400+GB that is unallocated. I thought the first drive might be a recovery drive, but I compared it to the recovery drive on my Windows 7 laptop. The Vista drive has a Users folder and Program Files folders, which my laptop's recovery drive didn't have. The Vista drive also has a bootsect file, which the 7 recovery drive didn't.

I'm thinking the unallocated space may have missing files, as I don't see why someone would leave 400GB unallocated and live off 50GB. My guess is that something happened to cause the partition to disappear. What doesn't make sense is having a partition with what looks like an OS, if it's not meant to run.

Should I try extending the first drive into the unallocated space? Is there something else I could try? I tried one of the free partition recovery programs and didn't find much. I'm running a second and it's found several (~40) lost partitions, but they've all been small, like 850KB to 1.5MB small. I think there's stuff somewhere in the partition, but since I don't have extra cash to drop on good data recovery software, I'm thinking I might just return the computer and suggest she take it somewhere with access to those kinds of programs.

Update: Second scan completed. Scan found 2 more partitions, one, a 13GB System Image partition, and the other, a 3MB partition containing System Volume Information. Still hundreds of GB of space unaccounted for.

All you can do then is put the drive back into the computer and let
the recovery partion send it back to out of the box spects.
Hit f11 key during bootup.

Or you could do you to tell them to take it some place else.

Jimmy

you could save their personal files and do a fresh install. Start over then you would know what was there.
This link will take you to recovery tools for the partitions.

TestDisk - CGSecurity

you could save their personal files and do a fresh install. Start over then you would know what was there.
This link will take you to recovery tools for the partitions.

Click to expand...

The problem is that I can't find their personal files. I feel like they have to be somewhere in the unallocated space, but I just can't get to them.

TestDisk was the second partition recovery program that I tried. It did find partitions, but it didn't find any (outside of the factory image) that were large enough to hold any files or programs.

I've resigned to not being able to restore the computer to it's pre-crash state. Thanks a lot for the help, anyway.

If I need to get to files and Vista won't let me I use a Ubuntu disc and the files are just like any other file. I have it on a bootable USB stick from here.

Boot and run Linux from a USB flash memory stick | USB Pen Drive Linux