A lady at church, Angela, couldn’t get her laptop to load successfully and needed her work files that she always traveled with. I looked at it for her and was unable to access her files at all through the laptop. Luckily though I was eventually able to get her files for her so I wanted to post about it in case anyone else ever has a similar issue and to let them know all hope is not lost!
Problem Details (skip if you just want the solution used)
It seems a windows update had messed up some GUI system files so nothing would show when the laptop booted. It was just a black screen with a white cursor. Booting into safe mode had the same effect. I booted to a Windows XP cd to try and access the Recovery prompt. To do so you have to have the administrator password though. This was a Gateway laptop so who knows what the password was. I tried blank and some other defaults but couldn’t guess it. So I officially had no way of accessing her files through the laptop.
Solution
I went to CompUSA and bought a “Laptop Hard Drive IDE Adapter” which allows you to plug a laptop hard drive into a normal IDE cable that is used in a desktop PC. This enabled me to turn on my computer and access her laptop hard drive as a secondary hard drive which means I could browse its files without its Windows being used as the operating system. Then I just copied the files she wanted backed up to one of my other hard drives and I burned a DVD of them. Hopefully this helps anyone whoever needs to access files from their laptop hard drive when their laptop isn’t working for them.
Caution
This was done with the understanding that the laptop hard drive was not malfunctioning and that it was a software issue that was causing the problem. If this had been a hardware issue and the hard drive was malfunctioning this solution would probably not work.
