My laptop has become unbootable, and because system restore has never been initiated, meaning there are no restore points available; and because the repair utility doesn't detect any problems; and because I have never backed up my system files (I've only had the computer for a month); it seems as though I have lost all of my personal files. I have a few questions, for anyone who can help. Could I possibly install a second operating system, such as linux or win98 as a temporary measure, just so that I can retrieve my personal files? Is there any other option I have, that won't cost me money, that can be used to retrieve the files? Any help would be most appreciated.
My advice is to use the 15 day demo of easyimage to make an image backup of your system partition (or all the partitions if you have the space) of the laptop and save it to an external drive. Your going to have to install easy image on another computer and reboot, next you will have to make a "recovery boot cd" start/programs/easyimage/recovery media builder, you will then use that boot cd to bootup the laptop. Make sure you have an external drive pluged-in and on when the computer boots up so that easyimage will recognize it. From the easy image screen choose backup, choose what you want to backup and you will save it to a folder on the external drive. When it's complete you can plug the external drive into the working computer and from easy image, you will choose "explore" and browse to the "backup" you save saved on the external drive. It will assign a drive letter to the backup and will showup as a seperate hard drive in "my computer". http://www.eazsolution.com/en/easyimage.php The above way is the best way to do it because it will save an exact copy of your laptop hard drive somewhere else, but you can also use a linux livecd (doesn't require installation)to recover the files, but that is more complicated (but doable and free) Once you save all the important files, you can attempt to fix the laptop. More than likely the boot sector got corrupted. As long as you have a saved image partition you can fix it, if you have the vista installation disk, you can do a repair and see if that can get it to boot up again. http://neosmart.net/wiki/display/EBCD/Recovering+the+Vista+Bootloader+from+the+DVD
