[messyart]

well, a while back i did a system restore on my laptop, it was finew for the rest of the day but then when i went to turn it on the next, it gave me a blue screen, i've tryed to go into safe mode, it tells me there is a problem. it says press f8 for advanced things, none of the options do anything, they either give me another blue screen or restart my laptop, they appear to start loading up what they needed to but then just restart.

i've had it checked by a few pc competant mates but they clueless, someone told me that a drive was currupted, and that i'll need to rebuild.

i want to know, is there any way i can retrieve all of my files?

i've written crap loads of fluff and stories for the hobby and can't get to them. it is imperretive that they are not lost. please help.

[Restayvien]

A corrupt drive is a possibility, but that shouldn't prevent you accessing BIOS settings. I suggest finding an external harddrive or a bootable disk and try booting from that. If it works then it's the HDD, if not then it's more serious.

I'm not very familiar with laptops, but I imagine there is some way of connecting the HDD to a desktop PC somehow. Can you give me the make and model? If you can connect it to a desktop you can back the data up.

[Delightfully Emo]

Originally Posted by messyart

i want to know, is there any way i can retrieve all of my files?

Download the latest copy of Ubuntu. Whats neat about Ubuntu, is that you can boot off of the disk. Make an Ubuntu disk and pop it int he drive. It should boot off the cd (if not than change that in your BIOS), and let it load. It will take a while because it has to load the OS from a CD. You should be able to browse your hard drive and recover any non corrupted files to a flash drive, or another form of external media (just dont remove the Ubuntu CD). This should all work, that is unless the problem is not HDD related. Good luck!

[Restayvien]

Ubuntu sounds good, though I've never used it. Let us know how it goes mate.

[GeekyGator]

The LiveCD might not work right if your harddrive is corrupted AND you have under 1 gigabyte of RAM, since it won't be able to cache things to the HDD and might not be able to load everything to RAM.

[Delightfully Emo]

I think Ubuntu wont load the entire OS, I believe it loads selective things, and if you need the others it loads it, and unloads others. I think you can run it safely with 512MB or memory. Regardless of his specs, or knowing the HDD is corrupted, he should still try. What does he have to lose? He can only gain from it, and it is a good chance that he could recover some data.

[GeekyGator]

Ah, you're almost certainly right. Of course he should still try, but I figure the more he knows, the better.

[Delightfully Emo]

True, I may have gotten his hopes up of recovering all his data, when this may not be the case. Thats one thing about computers. You can guess what they will do, but you can never really be sure. With something so small and precisely made, you figure it would work perfect each time.

Anyway, good luck, and make sure you get back to us. And if you can't figure out what to do, make sure you ask. The best help is free, and this is the place to get it.

[GeekyGator]

If the drive is broken but you have important data, take it to your nearest CompUSA, Circuit City, whatever your local computer store is. They can read the data off the disk and put it on an external hard drive for you for somewhere around $100. Good deal if you absolutely have to have the data from a corrupt drive.

[messyart]

well, i'm sort of in luck, a mate of my dad's mate is an 'expert' and can help, he's not sure how much he can save but he can fix the problem, cheers you guys. as a side note, a mate tried Ubuntu, my laptop couldn't load it up. don't know why.