backing up hard-drive

[cyanide]

Okay, this is no ordinary back-up job.

A friend came to me today, 'cause he's having problems with Win XP on Pentium4, 40G drive, 256Ram, 1.7Ghz

Some History
He purchased it a year ago and had Win ME installed and recently had problems, because it was freezing up. He took it to a nearby shop where they upgraded it to Win XP. And no, I don't have a cd or boot-disk

Now, it's my turn
He brought it to me and when I start it up, sometimes, it will freeze 2 minutes after booting and sometimes right after booting, it will automatically re-boot. I did have enough time to check the cpu which was at 100%.

I was able to boot into safe-mode and thinking that it might be too many task-bar processes, I unchecked several of them. Now when I boot up it won't load at all, not even safe-mode ! I'm getting a blue screen and after some research, found that the codes meant a corrupt file system.

I'm not worried about the OS. there's no problem formatting the disk and doing a fresh install, but...
There's 2 Gigs of pictures on the drive, he needs to save(for his occupation). How can I grab them?
Is there a way to copy to disk or maybe make a partition from command prompt?

Or any other ideas so that this data can be kept intact?

Thanks

[Sualdam]

These things are usually much easier to say than to actually do, but I backed up my own critical files with a corrupt install a couple of years ago.

The corruption occurred as I was upgrading to XP Pro.

At the time, I had a spare HDD which I had installed and I simply copied the files over using a start-up disk and simple DOS commands.

Is that likely to work in this case?

[softwaresubmit]

Connect this HDD to your PC and simply copy all the files. If filesystem (partition table for example) is corrupt, you may use one of the commercial utilities for advanced data recovery. You may check http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/Software/Disk_Management/Error_Checking_and_Repair/ for start.

And if the system freezes, I'd also check:
- cooling (system temperatures too high)
- memory - perform a "low level" extensive test using DocMemory http://www.docmemory.com/PAGE/products/doc/docinfo.asp or other similar software

[cyanide]

Hi,

Thanks very much for the replies.
At the moment, a spare drive is not a possibility.
I have 2 at my home, but both are full.

I was able to grab and produce the start up disks.
I was able to boot to the set up screen.
I did some research and found that I could go to the repair option and then type chkdsk /r
However, it is not found !?

So, I'm not sure what I can do now.
I'd like to be able to copy the files to cd, if possible

[Sualdam]

Maybe something in this list can help:

http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/utils.htm

There's a CD/CD-RW DOS backup utility listed - I guess that's the sort of thing you want.

There's also a 'convert to file' utility that could then be split across (a heck of a lot of) floppies at a push :)

[mikmik]

Also, check PM for message.
Is it a FAT32 or NTFS file system - if it was an actual 'upgrade' then it is FAT32, but if it was reformat and install - the term 'upgrade' may still have been used, but never let anyone just do the 'overlay' upgrade from ME or we will get very angry (LOL).
You will probably want to try this at the command (type this and hit enter and ignore the warnings but wait till I phone you anyways)

prompt: fixboot c:\ -and if not, type HELP and it will list the available commands.
If you can boot to the command promt in safe mode, then this: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;304449&Product=winxp

This is the master page for info about command console, using from boot floppies etc to every thing you can do: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;314058&Product=winxp

Sauldam, that is a darned [o; good page, it has quite a few good copy/transfer apps (xxcopy etc) and I will explore.

And softwaresubmit obviously knows his stuff very well to, that docmem is a beautiful thing!