Transfering hard drive data?

Question

i think my laptops motherboard is fried and i want to transfer my hard rives data to an external hard drive or to another computer but my laptop cannot access the operating system windows xp so i need a way to do it without using windows xp?

Answer 1

its a laptop hard drive so the hard disk will be smaller than your average hard disk, 2½" 8.5 mm so you will need a converter so your able to use an external hard drive or another method would be to simply put it into another pc with an operating system but you have to have the converter first, the converters are fairly cheap anyways.

Answer 2

Well...if your laptop mobo is fried, there is no way you are going to get to your OS. Your best bet is to take out the hdd and mount it in an external enclosure or a dock. You should be careful not to damage your laptop components unless you really don't care what happens to the other parts as long as you get you data back. Be very careful and read some guides on removing the drive. Good luck.

Answer 3

put the HDD in an external case and access the data from there..  

Answer 4

You can either borrow or buy a connector that will convert your hard drive into a USB device.

Depeding on what kind of HD you have, it will be similar to this -

http://www.shop.com/+-a-Laptop+HD+to+USB...

Bring your HD to Bestbuy or Circuit City and show them, and they will give you the correct one!

Then just attach it to another computer and pull your important files off!

Answer 5

You could get a copy of linux which boots from cd/dvd/flash drive etc.

Most recent versions are fine to read NTFS partitions (xp/vista), so you could copy files to cd/dvd or flashdrive easily enough and copy that way.

If you are booting from cd/dvd, usually the boot disc needs to stay in the drive - but there are versions which can load everything in ram and then let you take the disc out.  Watch out with the live boots though, they appear to let you "write" to their filesystem, but this is 99.99% only a "ram disk" which will disappear as with anything normally in ram, so use something non-volatile!