I recently had a request from a friend to get his Windows PC working
because it gets stuck at some point in the boot process.
Assuming he wants to keep his data and the manufacturer have not had the
foresight to create OS and data partitions it seems to me there are
these options for this kind of task:
1. Obtain windows specific recovery tools to try to fix the boot problem
without destroying the data.
2. Copy the data from the hard disk to somewhere else, re-install and
then put the data back.
For the second option again I can see two possibilities:
1. Take out the hard disk, mount it in a machine that works and copy the
files onto the working machine's hard disk.
2. Boot a Live CD on the broken machine and copy the files over the
network to a working machine.
Of the above two I have done number one, moving the hard disk, before
and it is usually pretty straightforward but in this case the broken
machine is a laptop so I don't know what luck I'd have trying to mount
the hard disk in a desktop machine.
So, I'm contemplating the second option and I'd like to know, please, if
anyone has any favourites or recommendations of live CDs that are good
for this purpose or any other ideas or suggestions.
Steve.
