Windows 7 Troubles

[Rennn]

The laptop of a family member, which uses Windows 7, recently had a black screen of death. Windows startup repair was launched twice, the first time I let it continue for five hours, the second time for more than twelve hours. There was no change and no indication of progress, so I ended startup repair both times. I looked online, and it seems that startup repair is unreliable at best against a black screen of death. The contents of the HDD are extremely important to my family, as that hard drive contains a lot of family history and photos, only about 50% of which were backed up.

 

I bought a hard drive enclosure, and attempted to get the files on to my pc. However, it says the hard drive needs to be formatted to be used, and I haven't done that yet because I've heard that formatting a hard drive erases it. Is it safe to format the hard drive, or should I find some other way of accessing the contents of the HDD?

[Korodic]

Hello rennnnnnnn. Yes, that's certainly no good, especially when in a drive enclosure... You can try to recover it with different utilities or replugging it back in, sometimes you get luck with that one. Then again, sometimes it says you may want to format it, but you can still access it (this happens with my one flash drive because windows considers it "dirty").

 

What I usually do for these situations is use my "DriveWire" hardware to hook up an HDD to a computer (the enclosure is probably about the same), then I boot into a WindowsPE environment, from there I usually use a file system program to grab stuff. Or create a winimage of the drive if possible. There is a chance it is gone forever as is due to corruption.

[bben46]

DO NOT FORMAT! That will destroy any data on that drive making it un recoverable. :facepalm:

 

When using the drive externally, you should be able to get it to assign a new drive letter without formatting it.

 

If it is a USB external, don't plug in the external drive until after you power up. Wait until after the computer boots up completely on the internal hard drive. Then plug in the external drive - You should get the "Found New Hardware" message, then installing driver for the new hardware, then "your new hardware is ready to use."

 

It should assign a new drive letter - if your internal HD is C: and your Optical drive is E: (Most common arrangement) - then the external will likely show up as F:.. Windows assign the next available open drive letter to a new device.

 

Then use a program such as terracopy to copy the stuff you want into a new folder on your internal Hard drive. Using USB it could take a while if there is a lot to copy.

 

Sometimes you can force a drive letter, but that is more complicated.

 

Link for Terracopy: http://www.majorgeeks.com/TeraCopy_d5674.html

Much faster than the windows copy, and it has error recovery - and will skip a file instead of terminating the copy process like the windows copy function. :thumbsup:

[Rennn]

DO NOT FORMAT! That will destroy any data on that drive making it un recoverable. :facepalm:

 

When using the drive externally, you should be able to get it to assign a new drive letter without formatting it.

 

If it is a USB external, don't plug in the external drive until after you power up. Wait until after the computer boots up completely on the internal hard drive. Then plug in the external drive - You should get the "Found New Hardware" message, then installing driver for the new hardware, then "your new hardware is ready to use."

 

It should assign a new drive letter - if your internal HD is C: and your Optical drive is E: (Most common arrangement) - then the external will likely show up as F:.. Windows assign the next available open drive letter to a new device.

 

Then use a program such as terracopy to copy the stuff you want into a new folder on your internal Hard drive. Using USB it could take a while if there is a lot to copy.

 

Sometimes you can force a drive letter, but that is more complicated.

 

Link for Terracopy: http://www.majorgeeks.com/TeraCopy_d5674.html

Much faster than the windows copy, and it has error recovery - and will skip a file instead of terminating the copy process like the windows copy function. :thumbsup:

 

Thank you for the reply. I downloaded TeraCopy, and attempted to use it to recover files from the HDD. The problem is, it doesn't recognize that there are any files on the external HDD (which is E:, btw). I didn't format it, so I'm not sure what to think now. Do you think the stuff is actually gone, or unrecognized? This isn't good... I'm going to be the one blamed if everything is gone.

 

I did have the external HDD attached before the pc had booted, the first time I attempted to copy the files before I asked here. Would something like that cause this issue?

Edited November 16, 2012 by Rennn

[Rennn]

Hello rennnnnnnn. Yes, that's certainly no good, especially when in a drive enclosure... You can try to recover it with different utilities or replugging it back in, sometimes you get luck with that one. Then again, sometimes it says you may want to format it, but you can still access it (this happens with my one flash drive because windows considers it "dirty").

 

What I usually do for these situations is use my "DriveWire" hardware to hook up an HDD to a computer (the enclosure is probably about the same), then I boot into a WindowsPE environment, from there I usually use a file system program to grab stuff. Or create a winimage of the drive if possible. There is a chance it is gone forever as is due to corruption.

 

Thanks for the ideas.

[Korodic]

unrecognizable is unrecognizable unfortunately to my understanding. Might try googling a bit more with that keyword :confused:

[bben46]

Hooking up an external drive before powering up may (and may not, depending on the BIOS settings) cause the computer to try to boot on the external drive instead of the internal - It should not delete or erase any files though.

 

It is possible that whatever caused the problem trashed the master boot record on the drive. Usually the data can still be read by booting on another drive and treating the second (bad) drive as a slave.