computer techie question

[weaselnoze]

so the gf's laptop crashed. go dell. i'll never buy a dell system.  anyway it appears to start loading windows (windows logo and little load bar underneath) but then it goes to the blue screen of death.  teh message is 'UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME'.  then the normal blah blah about hardware etc..  is there anychance of recovering data before i reformat it?  i dont wanna take the HD out and throw it on another computer..

[Onlypastrana199]

You can sometimes get data off using a hard drive adapter, just because its not bootable doesn't mean everything is gone. I bought mine off ebay for $0.41 + $2 for shipping....before you reformat though I would do a drive test and make sure that the drive isn't failing. When dells give that error message it is usually signaling that something else is wrong to cause that. 90% of the ones I had worked on like that had bad drives (yay for dell) and if you didn't do the test they'd crap out 1-2weeks after the reformat all over again.  It's not making any weird noises is it? Was she getting errors before?

[Mitch]

There's a decent chance to get most of the data. You'd have to boot off a CD/usb stick.  It would be easier to take out the hard drive, it's just one screw, and throw it in another xp system.

[weaselnoze]

could i pop out the drive and throw it into my PC as a slave?

[dracflamloc]

If its a laptop drive you'd need a converter. Best bet is to get a bootable linux livecd and see if your data is still there, You could also try booting the windows xp cd and doing a repair install

Chances are though that its not Dells fault. That kind of error typically is the result of a virus

[weaselnoze]

i dont have the resources or the time to get converters or any software etc.. i'll try the xp repair and see what i can do.

[Onlypastrana199]

I have an iso image of a bootable virtual windows environment that might help...let me know if you want it and I'll email it.

[Cannon Fodder]

I would say use Bart PE and map a drive to another machine, or buy the adapter and pull the drive.