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Windows 7 Professional

2K views 23 replies 6 participants last post by  dmccoy 
#1 ·
I did try a search for this... went through half a dozen pages and maybe about 20 some-odd posts, but it's almost 4am here and I'm frustrated and exhausted and have to up by 7am, so I gave up searching.

Our daughter did something to her laptop, but doesn't know what she did [ if she even did anything, she's not totally tech savvy ] and now it won't load a thing. She's got pictures on it that she really wants to get off, she doesn't really care about anything else. I was attempting to access Command Prompt so I could *very* manually get her pix off, but it won't load either. I don't know what to do now. I don't know how to take her hard drive out or where it even is or how I could connect it to my laptop so I could at least "see" the files. So I figured going through Command Prompt would be *easier* [ yeah, I know, it would probably take me a year, but at least I know how to do it ]

So her laptop is Windows 7 Professional and a Dell. Other than that, I don't know and she didn't bother to learn it to remember. It will only boot up into the Safe Mode options, but even after selecting Safe Mode with Command Prompt, it just starts to load Windows and reboots [ as do any of the other options, I tried ]. There is no Recovery disk, she didn't know to make back up disks [ and, quite honestly, I never even thought to tell her she should and explain how... my bad totally on that ] and it probably wouldn't matter because I can't change the Boot order in Startup because there's a little padlock locking that screen and the laptop won't read any other drive [ she has a CD / DVD drive and I tried plugging my external A drive ].

Is there another way to make the laptop go into Safe Mode with Command Prompt? Some other way to access it without being able to get into Windows? I even own Dos disks [ yup, the 4 1/4 ones ] and hoped to access the Prompt that way, but no such luck.

Thanks in advance :)
 
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#2 · (Edited by Moderator)
Please look at the bottom of the laptop and let us know the model and service tag #.

You said you can not boot with cd/dvd or usb either or have you tried? If so, we can burn a bootable disk of some type and then press F12 if needed during startup to access the boot menu to boot from one of these options. Usually the optical drive is set as the first boot device.

**reference to tool removed by mod**
 
#3 ·
heyya dckeks, we cannot use that tool here at TSG as it contains non-legit tools, so I've removed that reference.

thanks,

v
 
#4 ·
Okay sorry about that.
 
#5 ·
#6 ·
#7 ·
Thanks, but I don't know if that'll help? Upon further investigation - and by that I mean interrogation [ and severe interogation, short of the desk lamp aimed in her face and the whole good cop / bad cop thing, lol ] - I found out from our daughter that what happened was she'd turned on the screen saver option and went she went to start up her laptop again, it asked for her password to login, which she obviously no longer remembers and didn't realize she even had anymore. After getting frustrated with typing in various passwords she normally uses, she'd get ticked and turn off her laptop [ several times I do believe, although she won't admit to that ] instead of shutting it down.

Now, I know that none of you can help with the password issue, and I don't think a Recovery or Repair will help for this, so now my question is: how else can I copy her pictures as I still can't access the Command Prompt? Is there a way to connect her hard drive to another laptop [ because swapping them obviously won't help due the dagflabbit password ] so I can back up her pictures that way? Would I need special cords and what would they be? Or will the URLs that dckeks provided help with that? [ will check them out shortly ]

I do have a laptop as well, mine is still XP [ don't judge! lol] because it's mostly just for backup. Is it possible to access her drive from mine?
 
#8 ·
Sounds like a real mess, sorry to hear.

If it will boot at all we can get around the password by logging in to the default account. However it sounds like you can not get that far.

Please try to Create a bootable disk using one of the links I sent you so we can see if we can get it to boot. If not, since safe mode will not even work, the your next option is to remove the drive and connect with a USB caddy to another computer to access the files. Once you have the files off, then we can wipe the drive and reinstall Windows posssibly depending on the version and or if you have the media.

Also please provide the model and or Service tag #. Some laptops make it very easy to remove the drive and its not the difficult usually anyway. but since I dont know the model it is hard to help. Let me know if any questions or how you would like to proceed.
 
#9 ·
Thank you. I've had a few more issues:

1. the EaseUS requires a Hard drive capacity of 16TB. Her hard drive doesn't have that capacity and neither does mine [ have to download to mine first ]

2. Macrium Reflect - I got an error message: "The Macrium Reflect download option list was not retrieved or is corrupt. Please restart the download agent." I did try to restart and then just deleted it and downloaded it again and got the same error. Don't know what's up with that?

3. And the last one is huge - 807 MB - I have nothing big enough to put that on in order to use it in her laptop. I thought we had blank CD's still, but haven't been able to find one.

4. I can get to the Safe Mode screen, but only ever tried to access the Safe Mode with Command Prompt as I know Dos and how it works [ I know it's not called Dos anymore, but I'm old school and it'll always be Dos to me :) ]

5. Her laptop has been off since yesterday, so maybe since it's had a chance to "relax and breathe" it'll do stuff [ crosses fingers ]

6. Without being able to get into it, upon reading the actual laptop, it's a Dell Latitude D360, has Windows 7 Professional on it, Model #PP18L and I don't see anything that says Service tag number? I've had to peel off a multitude of Tinkerbell stickers off the bottom, but don't see anything that specifically says Service Tag.... oh, nevermind, found it: DL2RXF1... the ONE sticker that was sideways... lol
 
#10 ·
If you can't get into Windows on the D630 you can take the hard drive out very easily as shown in the video.
You can then connect the drive to your working laptop with an adapter cable or caddie and copy the photos onto it.

 
#11 ·
Without having watched video just yet... do I need special cables or can I use what we have here? Any idea what the cost would be? I'm gonna be out and about today so maybe I can pick something up. We're in Canad-eh, so pricing will be a little different.
 
#12 ·
You will need a USB caddy similar to something like the following:

USB caddy

You may also want to pickup at least 8GB USB flash drive and/or DVD-R discs to help with repairing.
 
#13 ·
My husband order a caddy and it should be here in a couple days [ gotta love Amazon, although I think we have more of their boxes than they do, lol ]. He's also going to download the programs you mentioned earlier, and see what he can do with them.

Now, the Repair programs won't do anything against the password issue, right? I'm assuming we may have to upgrade her laptop to a higher version of Windows and just wipe her existing drive clean [ while setting our OWN passworded Administrative account and she can use a Guest one so we NEVER have this issue again!! ]

Thank you SO much for your help :) :) :) :)
 
#14 ·
Ok good. Once the files are backup then we can see what options we might have to repair it. According to Dell website it shows this computer was shipped with Windows XP Pro.

If you purchased it used then that might explain why Windows 7 is installed or did you possibly upgrade it. If Windows has to be reinstalled then you will need a copy of the Windows 7 disk if that what you decide to put back on it.

I won’t know much more until we can get into the computer and see what options we may have for repair. However since safe mode can be accessed that is good sign.
 
#15 ·
My husband purchased the laptop for our daughter and had bought it refurbished, so that would be why Windows 7 is on it. It didn't come with anything, unfortunately.

Can I go to Dell and download a Repair CD? I know with my XP, I had to order one, but that was years ago, and technology has a penchance of changing day to day. When my hubby bought my Compaq, in the time it took him to walk across the street, fax info and walk back across the street [ 20 minutes TOPS ], my Compaq was outdated already... insane!
 
#16 ·
You can try to contact Dell with with your service tag # and see if you can still get a recovery disk that old, but I am not sure you can. The next better option is if you have the Windows 7 key then, you can purchase Windows 7 recovery disks that are pretty cheap on Amazon or other places. There still may be a possibility to repair if it will boot at all into safe mode or using other software.
 
#18 ·
Unfortunately it only works for retail copies of Windows 7 and they disabled the direct link to the Windows 7 iso some time ago.
 
#21 ·
Hi Liz :)

Good to know.

I don't have a windows machine set up for the Internet these days, but back in the day, Win7 Home and Pro were easy to download through Digital River servers (legally) and I grabbed one of each early on.

Oh how time flies .....

Probably never use them as one of the first things I do with a new computer is burn a drive image.
 
#22 ·
Thank you all for your information :)

I doubt we can find out the Key since we've never really been in the laptop [ it's our daughter's laptop and I've only been on it to show her how to clear out her Browser Caches and various Temp files. ]

Been waiting on hubby - he's on holiday's this week so he's doing catch up on some things round the house - and he bought he and I new puters and has his finally set up [ mine's still in the box since Friday, LOL ]. He's currently looking at the downloads.

Other than that, nothing has changed other than I got a sunburn yesterday - our first REAL day of summer where the temperature was actually in double digits!! :O . Feels weird getting one with all the snow still on the ground, lol.

Will keep everyone posted on what we've managed to accomplish.
 
#24 ·
I wasn't sure if we could provide that information so good to know.
 
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