How to access damaged hard disk over the network

  • Thread starter Thread starter Tojo
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Tojo

I have a machine running W2K Professional and an old laptop running W98SE.
The laptop hard disk has some bad sectors and won't boot. Scandisk just hang
on 84%, and I've run several other tools to fix it, but it just doesn't
boot. The OS already came in the laptop when I bought it, so I don't have
the W98 installation CD. The laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive but it
has USB ports and a network port. Before I format the damaged HD, I want to
save some files that are still there, and I was thinking to do it either by
a USB pen drive or over the network to my W2K machine. Which is the
simplest/best? How can I do it?

Thanks so much,
TJ
 
Tojo said:
I have a machine running W2K Professional and an old laptop running W98SE.
The laptop hard disk has some bad sectors and won't boot. Scandisk just hang
on 84%, and I've run several other tools to fix it, but it just doesn't
boot. The OS already came in the laptop when I bought it, so I don't have
the W98 installation CD. The laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive but it
has USB ports and a network port. Before I format the damaged HD, I want to
save some files that are still there, and I was thinking to do it either by
a USB pen drive or over the network to my W2K machine. Which is the
simplest/best? How can I do it?

Thanks so much,
TJ
Click to expand...
Depending on the BIOS in your laptop, you might be able to set up a
boot server and net boot. However, the prognosis is not good.
 
Tojo said:
I have a machine running W2K Professional and an old laptop running W98SE.
The laptop hard disk has some bad sectors and won't boot. Scandisk just hang
on 84%, and I've run several other tools to fix it, but it just doesn't
boot. The OS already came in the laptop when I bought it, so I don't have
the W98 installation CD. The laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive but it
has USB ports and a network port. Before I format the damaged HD, I want to
save some files that are still there, and I was thinking to do it either by
a USB pen drive or over the network to my W2K machine. Which is the
simplest/best? How can I do it?

Thanks so much,
TJ
Click to expand...
BTW, have you tried booting into safe mode? With what results?
 
I have a machine running W2K Professional and an old laptop running
W98SE. The laptop hard disk has some bad sectors and won't boot.
Scandisk just hang on 84%, and I've run several other tools to fix it,
but it just doesn't boot. The OS already came in the laptop when I
bought it, so I don't have the W98 installation CD. The laptop doesn't
have a floppy disk drive but it has USB ports and a network port.
Before I format the damaged HD, I want to save some files that are
still there, and I was thinking to do it either by a USB pen drive or
over the network to my W2K machine. Which is the simplest/best? How
can I do it?

Thanks so much,
TJ
Click to expand...

One option is a bootable CD that will boot to '98. (I am assuming the
notebook has a CD drive.)

http://www.nu2.nu/bootcd/ has instructions for creating DOS boot CD's.

Another option is to pick up a notebook IDE to standard IDE adapter and put
the HD in another computer as a slave. Somethng like this:
http://www.compusa.com/products/product_info.asp?product_code=294956
&pfp=srch1 , $8.00 at CompUSA.


That way, you can run all of the recovery utilities necessary, 'locally'.
 
Tojo said:
I have a machine running W2K Professional and an old laptop running W98SE.
The laptop hard disk has some bad sectors and won't boot. Scandisk just hang
on 84%, and I've run several other tools to fix it, but it just doesn't
boot. The OS already came in the laptop when I bought it, so I don't have
the W98 installation CD. The laptop doesn't have a floppy disk drive but it
has USB ports and a network port. Before I format the damaged HD, I want to
save some files that are still there, and I was thinking to do it either by
a USB pen drive or over the network to my W2K machine. Which is the
simplest/best? How can I do it?
Click to expand...


Unless you can get the laptop to boot, you cannot access it's hard
drive via a network or USB thumb drive; both methods require the OS to
be running. As you cannot boot the laptop, your only option would be to
purchase a special adapter that would enable you to slave the laptop
hard drive into another computer.


--

Bruce Chambers

Help us help you:



You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don't ever count on having
both at once. - RAH
 
Slave it into another box. Then see if that box can read it and gain acces
to the files. If yo have any form of encryption, try ghosting the drive
using the options -f, -r and -o (">ghost -fro"). It might take it a while,
but it may get enough back to boot and recover some files.
 
The adapters are not expensive, all they are (usually) is a board with
different pin spacing on each side.
 
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