Soapy Sam
28th February 2007, 04:20 PM
Call me Ishmael.
Call me seven kinds of Idiot.
I had 3 copies of a whole lot of data including several years of photos. They were on 2 USB externals and an internal EIDE drive.
Then one USB drive died.
Then- for reasons too stupid to explain, I moved the data copy from USB drive 2 onto the C: drive.
Which promptly died.
Or at least XP died and refused to boot, even in safe mode. The BIOS is fine, but that's it.
My XP factory reset disc is several thousand miles away. (It's a kosher installation, but OEM. It tends to reformat the drive before it installs, which is NOT what I want).
That's when I remembered reading about something named BartPE, which is effectively an XP equivalent of a Linux CD bootable disc.
This program lets you prepare a bootable XP rescue CD (It can even be run from a USB flashdrive- with restrictions ). It uses the operating system files from your original system disc- or from your pc, if installed- to create a cut down, XP bootable on a CD, with chkdsk, a file manager (A43) and a networking setup. Ideally, you should make a rescue CD before your pc dies. I installed BartPE on another laptop and copied the system files from there. (XP pro instead of Home, but it was available).
I was then able to boot my laptop from the CD , network it to the other laptop by ethernet and salvage all the data- from an NTFS drive to a FAT32 USB drive configured as a network drive on the other laptop. Kewl.
So my C drive is workable. I still don't know what killed XP, but I'm not too bothered. When home, I will reinstall from the original system disc. Then I'll make a new rescue disc. Then I'll backup to DVD.
Maybe everyone here has heard of BartPE, but it was new to me.
It's a very useful bit of kit- and free, though I reckon I'll Paypal the writer something. I owe him.
Available here.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/
Call me seven kinds of Idiot.
I had 3 copies of a whole lot of data including several years of photos. They were on 2 USB externals and an internal EIDE drive.
Then one USB drive died.
Then- for reasons too stupid to explain, I moved the data copy from USB drive 2 onto the C: drive.
Which promptly died.
Or at least XP died and refused to boot, even in safe mode. The BIOS is fine, but that's it.
My XP factory reset disc is several thousand miles away. (It's a kosher installation, but OEM. It tends to reformat the drive before it installs, which is NOT what I want).
That's when I remembered reading about something named BartPE, which is effectively an XP equivalent of a Linux CD bootable disc.
This program lets you prepare a bootable XP rescue CD (It can even be run from a USB flashdrive- with restrictions ). It uses the operating system files from your original system disc- or from your pc, if installed- to create a cut down, XP bootable on a CD, with chkdsk, a file manager (A43) and a networking setup. Ideally, you should make a rescue CD before your pc dies. I installed BartPE on another laptop and copied the system files from there. (XP pro instead of Home, but it was available).
I was then able to boot my laptop from the CD , network it to the other laptop by ethernet and salvage all the data- from an NTFS drive to a FAT32 USB drive configured as a network drive on the other laptop. Kewl.
So my C drive is workable. I still don't know what killed XP, but I'm not too bothered. When home, I will reinstall from the original system disc. Then I'll make a new rescue disc. Then I'll backup to DVD.
Maybe everyone here has heard of BartPE, but it was new to me.
It's a very useful bit of kit- and free, though I reckon I'll Paypal the writer something. I owe him.
Available here.
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/