Hopefully this is the right place to ask.
Long story short, my sister's laptop is booting fine, when I log into Vista I get "welcome" for a few seconds, then all I get a black screen with an active mouse, and that's it. I've seen other people with this issue but could not get a definitive answer on how to fix it (tried rebooting to the last good configuration, it didn't help). In order to maintain some sanity and I either gonna restore the drive to dell factory setting, or wipe it and do a fresh XP install.
Before I do that, I want to try to save the files that are on there. There has to be a way to get access to the files on the drive and be able to move them to an external USB drive, without loading windows. Some kind of boot menu, or a program that lets you boot into it and access your files.
Hopefully someone here has a suggestion, since she has a ton of stuff on there and it would be a shame to delete it all.
Thanks
Long story short, my sister's laptop is booting fine, when I log into Vista I get "welcome" for a few seconds, then all I get a black screen with an active mouse, and that's it. I've seen other people with this issue but could not get a definitive answer on how to fix it (tried rebooting to the last good configuration, it didn't help). In order to maintain some sanity and I either gonna restore the drive to dell factory setting, or wipe it and do a fresh XP install.
Before I do that, I want to try to save the files that are on there. There has to be a way to get access to the files on the drive and be able to move them to an external USB drive, without loading windows. Some kind of boot menu, or a program that lets you boot into it and access your files.
Hopefully someone here has a suggestion, since she has a ton of stuff on there and it would be a shame to delete it all.
Thanks
