[dwlotter]

I stupidly installed a small software called co2saver on my Thinkpad running preinstalled Vista. Several weeks since backup. Windows shut down and wouldn't boot. I went to Operating System recovery and to make a long story short, only a complete erase of all files and reinstall will work, according to IBM support.

I want to find out if I can recover the files on the disk first, since the drive is working fine, I just can't access it via Vista. The only password I used was the one for starting Vista.

Please help if you can. Do I need to send it to a disk recovery place? I'm a semi-employed writer, I can't afford the $500-$2000.

Don Lotter
El Centro, CA (It's 107 in the shade today)

[Elvandil]

The easiest way is to connect it as a secondary drive to another machine and get your files that way.

[dwlotter]

Can someone tell me how to connect it as a secondary drive to another machine? Does the other machine need to be running Vista? How exactly does it connect? Do I need to take the hard drive out of the Thankpad? Thanks for any help.

[Elvandil]

It's not easy. You'd need to take the drive out, use an adapter, and connect it to a free cable in another machine.

My preference would be to create a bootable CD that would allow you access to your files. If you have access to an XP machine with a CD burner, you can make one. Then, your files could be burned to CD or transfered over the network (if any).

wwww.ubcd4win.com

[dwlotter]

will the bootable cd route enable access to readable files? does Vista not file them in a different way or encrypt?

[Elvandil]

With the bootable CD, NTFS access with no permissions issues is possible. The files can be copied from the hard drive.

If you have not specifically encrypted files, they will be accessible from the CD.

[dwlotter]

Thanks a million for your help. It's a huge relief to think I may have solution. Can I burn to a cd in that mode, given that the bootable cd is in that drive? will a usb drive connect in that mode?

[Elvandil]

If you have a Vista DVD, you may want to try booting from that and running Startup Repair first.

If not, the CD will work, but it's tricky if you have only one drive. You need to start the burning app, choose the files to be burned, and then, after all is loaded to memory, remove the CD and put in a blank. After the burning, nothing will work, of course, since the CD containing the programs is no longer in the drive. Then you can return the bootable CD or just reboot with it.

The CD contains some basic USB functionality and so long as your drive does not require any non-XP drivers, you should be able to use it.

[dwlotter]

I realized that I probably have to go the route of connecting the disk to another computer, as I have probably 40G of files to transfer. Only about 500M are critical, so if that doesn't work, I'll try burning to a cd or dvd.

[Elvandil]

OK. You can find the adapter at NewEgg or TigerDirect. They are only about $5.