[deluzione]

A friend of mine has an HP DV9500 laptop. He can't boot Windows Vista anymore for some reason, but he wanted to clean up anyway, so he asked me to back up his pictures and re-install Vista and all his programs. No problem, I thought BUT...

Since Vista won't boot (not normally or in safe mode) I tried booting Ubuntu from my USB-drive. Back up stuff and format the hard drive. Unfortunately Vista didn't close the NTFS partition properly, so I can't access it in Ubuntu, so I went to plan B.

Plan B was: remove the hard drive, put it in my Vista-PC , backup and format. But for some reason I can't access the drive.
Vista recognizes there's a drive, and gives it a drive letter, but when I try to access it in explorer Vista says "Location is not available", "F:/ is not accessible" and "Access denied" (all in 1 screen). If I go to the properties of the drive it says it's 0 bytes big.
My Vista Computer manager recognizes the drive better. It tells me it's a 104GB partition, 70GB used, 30GB free.
There's also another partition on that drive, which I can access normally. So that tells me the drive is ok physically (right?).

I've set the permissions to full (although there were a few files I had to skip because Vista didn't allow me to change the permission on those).

Now hoe can I access this partition and back up the important data on there?

[deluzione]

Seems like I'm the only one with this problem, since I can't find similar problems through Google..

[Noyb]

I wonder what would happen if you ran a data recovery on it.
http://free-backup.info/data-recovery-software.htm

The only program I've run is ..
http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm ..
the free trial will read the HD .. but you have to buy to get to recover the Data.

I don't know about any free Versions.

[deluzione]

Thanks, but those don't do it for me. The first one I have to use cd/floppy, which I don't have anymore, and the second one is a dead download link

Any other suggestions?

[deluzione]

I've downloaded this program and running it now. Seems like this is picking up the contents. I'll let you know.

[deluzione]

I did it! I recovered the hard drive using Power Data Recovery Pro..