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File Recovery The worse has happened and you haven't prepared. In my experience, most computer users have their files and operating system on a single drive and don't even think about backing up their files. If you're the local computer guy, sooner or later you'll be asked to recover files from a dead PC.
There are a lot of options for recovering files. The one you choose will depend on what you have at hand and the circumstances of the computer failure. The first option is to attempt to boot up the failed computer as it is. It might mean starting it in Safe Mode or disabling malware that has prevented the user from backing up their files.
To start in Safe Mode, continuously tap F8 as the computer loads up. From the resulting menu select Safe Mode With Networking if internet or network access is required, or just Safe Mode if it isn't. If you can successfully start in Safe Mode you can run a few scans to fix the computer or stick to the job at hand of recovering files. You'll usually be able to access files without malware running and should be able to quickly copy the required files to a CD / DVD, memory stick or an external hard drive. Starting in Safe Mode is much more preferred than starting normally and disabling malware as doing the latter will usually take a lot longer. You'll be waiting for everything to load up, identifying the malware and figuring out how to disable it. Even then you could find that copying files is much slower due to other process running in the background. Okay, so the computer won't boot. If you have power and are getting information displayed on the screen, you'll find clues on what to do next.
If you can see that Windows (or the installed operating system) is attempting to boot but is failing, you know that at least some of the hard drive is being read. If the PC can read that, it should be capable of reading most of the files on there, if not all.
Usually, a failed Windows boot results in a menu asking if you would like to Start Windows Normally, Start in Safe Mode or Used Last Known Good Settings. Of course, try Safe Mode, but you're likely to find that it cycles back to the menu again after another failed boot. The reason Windows is failing is because of a change in one or more critical files. It could be caused by an incorrect shut down, malware, somebody modifying the files, hard drive wear and tear or physical damage to the drive. In this case you could try repairing the operating system. There's a long list of possible fixes that, in my experience, rarely result in success. The quickest way to do this, in my opinion, is to reinstall the operating system. A lot of modern PCs have a recovery partition. Pressing the correct button or combination of buttons as the computer powers up will sometimes offer the option of a destructive or a non destructive restore. A non destructive restore will leave all current files intact.
If you don't have the option of using built in recovery tools, you can use the original operating system CD / DVD to restore the operating system. These two options have some disadvantages. The main disadvantage is that it takes a while! If your main task is just to recover files, fixing the PC isn't necessary. That being said, if you are expected to repair the computer, you're killing tow birds with one stone. Another disadvantage, especially when it comes to using an operating system CD, is that it's easy to press a wrong button and delete the files you're supposed to be recovering. You may find that when you try to reinstall the operating system you're prompted to format the drive first. You'll come across this if the drive is damaged or showing signs of age. In this case, installing the operating system isn't an option because formatting the drive will result in you losing the files. A new, favourite option of mine is to use a Live Linux CD.
Linux is an often free alternative operating system to Windows. It comes in many shapes and forms (also known as distributions). The type most useful here are the portable distributions. A portable distribution is basically an operating system on a CD or memory stick. It doesn't need installing, most computers will simply load up from the CD or memory stick. Puppy Linux is my current favourite of the several available options. It automatically detects all of your hardware and sets it up. You can easily access connected drives and you can connect external drives and memory sticks. You can even connect to the internet to store things online (or browse in an emergency) and there's an option of having it come packaged with Open Office. Once it has loaded up (most of which is automatic), you're presented with a desktop with several icons. You can bring up the main (like Start) menu either by clicking the orb in the bottom left corner or by right clicking anywhere on the desktop. To back up files here, you need to connect an external storage device (a memory stick/ memory card reader and memory cards is / are okay). Now got to Menu > Filesystem > File Managers > ROX-Filer file manager and select the folder you wish to copy from. Do the same again and select the folder that you wish to copy to. Now you should have two windows open. Resize them so that you can clearly see the two and drag over the files you wish to copy from the source to the destination folders. It may seem to freeze when copying some files. This is likely because the file can't be read because it is corrupt. The process will resume after the copy attempt for that file has completed. At the end of the copy process you will be informed of how many files have failed to copy. Of course, this option is only available if the computer in question is in good working order (except for the hard drive). You'll have to ensure that the CD / DVD drive or the USB boot option has priority in the BIOS. If the computer in question is suffering a hardware failure that is preventing it from booting up, you can set the hard drive up to another computer.
This can be quickly achieved if you have a USB - Hard Drive adapter (cheaply available must have piece of kit). You'd usually set the drive to Master (if it's an IDE drive) using the jumper settings, but a bit of trial and error may be necessary. This method won't always work. The second option to connect the hard drive to your computer is to physically install it. It doesn't necessarily take long if you've done it a few times before. The quickest option is to swap out a drive you're not using during the back up process, but you can go for a new drive install if you have a vacant connection and the appropriate cables. Once set up and powered on, the drive should, ideally, appear in Start > Computer (or My Computer) on a Windows PC and you should have access to it. If the drive isn't showing at all, and it isn't connected directly to the computer, connect it directly. If it still isn't showing, check the BIOS settings of the computer to see if it shows there. If it does, right click on Start > Computer and click on Manage. From here double click on Storage and then Disk Management. After a while all of the connected drives will show along with their partitions. If you see the new drive it may need the drive letter changing (it may clash with one of your existing drives). Right click it and click Change Drive Letter and Paths. Click change and change it to an unused letter. If, when you try to access the drive you are prompted to restart the computer, do so. If you are prompted to format the drive, don't! This method isn't going to work! If you do gain access to the drive, I suggest you copy the required files to one of your other drives before burning to CD / DVD (if you are planning on doing so) as a failed burn or damaged disk would result in you having to do the same again. It's worth using a file copy program to copy files instead of simply copying and pasting as any corrupt files will halt the process and you'll be left figuring out what's copied and what hasn't. If you are copying to an external drive, it's fine to do that straight away rather than copy to your system and then to the drive. I recommend that you virus scan files after copying them (but before trying to read them!). Copying an infected file isn't going to harm your computer and the time you have to access the drive may be limited by the condition of the drive. Recovering accidentally deleted files is much trickier.
When it comes to recovering files, it pays to understand a little about how they are stored. As you would imagine, files take up a given space on a hard disk. These files are addressed so that the computer can find them when requested to do so. When you delete a file you merely free up that given address although the file still remains. It remains until something else is put there. In theory, anything deleted should be recoverable. This is true, until, somebody or something writes a file to the drive. The problem here is that new files will take up the nearest available addresses. If a file you wish to recover is spread across several addresses and one of them now has something else in it, the whole file is unrecoverable. Knowing this you'll understand why it's important that nothing is stored on a hard drive awaiting such recovery. Of course, when a file is deleted, Windows won't show that it's actually still there. For this you need specialist software. There are a few options out there ranging in price, but I use two products from PC Inspector. One is Smart Recovery, specifically designed to recover files from memory cards. The other is File Recovery, designed to recover files from hard drives. When using File Recovery, it'll ask you what drive to scan for recoverable files, and where you'd like to save them. Of course, you don't want to save them on the original drive so you'll want a drive at least as big as the source drive. The scan will take some time (hours), but it's very powerful and, as long as nothing has been written to the drive, is usually successful. If you're still having problems, you can try combining two of the above options. For example, if the computer in question is dead, but when you connect the hard drive to another computer you are prompted to format it, you could run the Linux Live CD on the second computer as this is likely to let you access the drive to read the files.
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