Data Recovery

[amenon]

I have an IBM Thinkpad T23 and last evening the machine would not boot up. Called support and tried all options ( soft boot, BIOS changes, etc, etc) but of no avail. I kept getting a Config_systems_utilities failed or something to that effect.

Apparently I have a corrupted operating system but need to retrieve the data from my Hard drive (since i broke the cardinal rule of backing up data). Need help on what options I might have.

 

[~mr mixx~]

Not to familiar w/laptops but, can you boot-up to safe mode? if you can, then you have a good chance of recovering from the startup prob.

 

[inimino]

You can try a KNOPPIX CDROM, which you can burn and boot from.

Knoppix is a Linux distribution that fits on a single CD.

You can use that to boot the system, mount your existing Windows partition, and recover any files you need, backup them up to another system over the network. Then you can reinstall or replace the OS, once you have your files off the system you don't need to worry about wiping the hard drive.

The other possibility is to fix your Windows installation, which will probably be more difficult.