Hard drive no worky, Need to recover data

[lanwan]

I have a COMPAQ Presario 1600 laptop with XP Pro that goes into a reboot loop. Would not let me start into safe mode either. I have determinded that the hard drive has gone bad due to the many bad sectors it showed in scandisk. Normally with a tower I would just take out the drive and slave it onto another pc. In this case, with a laptop I am in a bit of a bind. I have a special Linux Boot CD that I used to backup some of my word and excel documents onto floppies (The CD has no networking cabablities). I can get into DOS with a bootable floppy. I am aware that there are DOS file transfer programs out there that can transfer data using the COM ports or the LPT ports. Is this the avenue I need to take? If so, where are some downloadable programs that I can use. Free software that is reasonably easy to understand is my first choice. Or something that I can download as a trial. I need to backup my Outlook pst file and my ACT stuff. Please help.

 

[wolluf]

You can buy an IDE adapter which will let you connect the drive to a PC (secondary IDE controller) - where you can more easily retrieve your data. They cost about ?5 here in UK.

 

[n00benduser]

Take the HDD out and pin it as a slave. Install it on a working computer with enough space to hold your data. Boot from the master HDD and just copy over the data you need. Then you can f-disk the drive and reinstall xp.

 

[Numbnortel]

If your pst file is not too large you could zip it and use #1. below. IF it is a default setup then the past is located at C:\Documents and Settings\"Owner"\Local Settings\Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook\Outlook.pst. Owner being your signin name. I dont have act on the computer but I think at work ours is under the default c:/act/Database name. If you know the name if the database you can search from dos CD ACT [ENTER] DIR [ENTER] If there are a lot of entries DIR /p

1. You could use winzip to span floppys if you have the drive.
2. If you have a cat5, network hookup you could get the driver for dos off the website for the card installed boot with that and use a cross over cable, thats cheap but not easy when worried about the hard drive. You say the scandisk gives bad sectors? I normally backup if possible what I need and reformat and reload, how old is the hard drive?

 

[lanwan]

Thanks for all your suggestions.