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[Lambtron]

So, my mom called me at work today, very frantic, letting me know that her computer was causing her problems. She was using IE, got 72 pop up windows, and turned the computer off without going to shutdown. When she rebooted, she got a message that says something to the effect of "your Windows won't boot properly, how would you like to try?" And lets you boot safe mode, normally, or last working configuration. When picking every configuration, a blue screen pops up for about a second, and the computer reboots, to go back to that menu screen.

When I popped in the Windows XP CD, and went to install, it said that hard drive was empty, and that in order to install anything on it, it would have to be formatted.

Here's the problem: We have no backups of the stuff she's got on her computer currently, and she's got about 3 or 4 years of very important worker's comp documentation, which she would be pretty fucked if we lost it. Is there anything I can do to try to recover this data, or is it a lost cause? Is my best bet going to be putting that harddrive in my PC and trying to copy the data over? Would Norton SystemWorks or some similar sort of program be of any help?

Thanks in advance... I just don't want to rush in to formatting if I've got other options.

 

[CaptainABAB]

I ran into a similar situation where the hard drive developed some pretty bad sectors around the windows file but I needed to retrieve some documents.

I burnt a copy of Knoppix onto CD, booted from the CD and used a network connection (Samba) to transfer files to another good computer.

Don't reformat until you have tried every last venue.

If you have the XP cd, what happens if you go into the recovery console? Can you view files there?

 

[Lambtron]

When I go to recovery console, everything is super slow and hangs. When I tried a DIR on C:\, it said there was some sort of error, and didn't list any files.

 

[Hitokage]

Knoppix is your ultimate safe mode. Use it to get your data on floppy, usb drive, cdr, or LAN. Should that fail then you might have to send the drive to a data recovery shop.

 

[CaptainABAB]

When I go to recovery console, everything is super slow and hangs. When I tried a DIR on C:\, it said there was some sort of error, and didn't list any files.

Sounds like your hard drive is dying or maybe close to death. You might have to resort to a data recovery shop.

 

[NohWun]

Take her hard drive out and install it as a secondary on another working computer.

If you can't copy the files off of it right away, try running a program like Norton Disk Doctor or something on it.

 

[fart]

the fact that it's super slow is a good clue that there's tons of error correcting going on (eg, massive bad sectors), so even if you pop it into another machine or boot off some other medium (ie, knoppix), there's a high possibility you still won't be able to get much off it. how much is the data worth to you? if it's >100$, you need to stop powering the thing on and get it to a data recovery shop. if it's worth less than that just boot to knoppix or put it in another machine or something and try to get whatever you can off of it (prepare for hours of waiting and frustration).

the one last ditch effort you can make is to run some kind of disk checker utility on it. run it in read only mode for now (it's probably not just a file system problem anyways), but there's a slight possibility that could be the problem.

sorry, but that's all i can tell you. in the future you should have your mom back up data that's worth more than a cheap disk drive on some kind of more reliable medium.