Recovering data from my hard drive before reinstalling XP?

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Zah1

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Hi guys, hope some one can help me out :
I have a Sony Vaio laptop which was working fine. Now when I switch on, it goes to the splash screen (logo), and is stuck there n? matter what I press. Been googling all night and day, and I think I might need to reinstall Windows XP.

Problem is I need a few files off the hard drive before I do that. Is it possible to transfer the data to another laptop, and can some one help me through the steps? Would really really appreciate it! I also have a spare external hard drive, can I transfer directly onto it, or does the data have to go onto another laptop first?
 
You could try to do a repair install of Windows XP.

Or take the hard drive out of your laptop and put it in a external enclosure then access the hard drive with the other laptop.

Or you could possibly boot off a live CD of some sorts and use that to get to the files you need and copy them off to your external hard drive.

Or boot into safe mode and disable all your startup programs and see if that doesn't help.

Or you could just boot into safe made and use that to copy your files to your external.

Getting into Windows Safe Mode
 
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To be safe, Copy the entire Documents and Settings folder, or at the very least the sub folder that was used for your primary logon. Also the public folders if you stored any data in them.

Then firstly try recovery/repair, if that fails do a fresh install by booting off a CD or USB Stick. It should install over the previous install.

Your HDD might be failing though, so the first step is getting your data secure and safe.
 
Either your have a problem with your OS, or your drive is failing. If the latter then stop trying to boot of it as the drive will degrade further and faster.

Safest bet is to take out the drive, connect it up to another machine and check the SMART values. If they are OK then your drive should be fine. If there are issues then you can try and copy off the important files. If it gets stuck along the way then you more serious problems.

First establish if it's the OS or the drive.
 
Hi there,
I am with South_Bit. First rescue the data that you can and booting continually is not going to do it.
You can find out more about the SMART values here
Once you have copied the data over and your SMART values are OK then you can look at the re-install.
I don't want to say you should have as I am as guilty as the next person, but problems like this emphasise that we should all do backups more often.

Regards

Tim
 
What is the laptop model?

Problem is not everybody has a second machine lying around, and especially not a 44pin IDE to 40 IDE converter/old enclosure...
 
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