Anyone good with Windows?

[liv]

So my brother emailed me in a panic, his friend's computer won't boot into Windows and he's scared to reinstall Windows in case he loses all her data. I know in theory reinstalling the OS is supposed to leave files untouched, but I also know that doesn't work very well. Does anyone know the black magic to save the files from the pre-boot screen? We've got as far as the Microsoft support documentation and some basic Google searches, anyone have anything better than that?

His description of the problem:

I have an XP disc. I booted it from the disc and it let me enter a recovery console. I tried a check disc recovery thing but that didnt help. If I run the fix boot program will it wipe all of R___'s data? Can I reinstall windows without wiping the C Drive? Is it easy? Is there a way of getting the data before reinstalling windows

Any suggestions much appreciated!

ETA: further question pulled up from the comments:

One little question, how do I get to the dos prompt? When I boot from the XP disc, I can enter the recovery console, reinstall windows or exit everything it seems to me. My research suggested that the recovery console doesn't give you enough access rights (?) to copy files to an external drive.

Comments

Re: Backing up Windows from Linux

[lethargic_man]

I'm afraid I didn't quite understand your post. what does:
"mount the Windows hard drive manually automatically" mean?
what is it to mount a file system?

Mounted filesystems in *nix are filesystems the OS knows about. So when, say, inserting a CD-ROM, the OS will make it available as part of the normal file hierarchy: mounting it automatically.

The Linux Live DVDs we are referring to here run the entire operating system off the DVD. When running them (or Fedora 10 at any rate) only the DVD filesystem is mounted; the Windows filesystem on the hard disk is not; so when you run Nautilus (the Gnome equivalent of Windows Explorer) you won't see anything on the hard disk; only on the DVD. The instructions I gave above are how to mount the hard disk on the filesystem.

and what is it to represent something by a device?

*nix has a folder of special files representing devices, including potentially present hard disks, DVDs and floppies. When mounting a drive, you have to specify both a mount point (an empty folder to attach the drive's filesystem to) and the device corresponding to the relevant device).

Also, where do I get hold of a Linux DVD from? do I just download onto my hard drive and burn onto a DVD?

Download Fedora 11 Live CD as an ISO image from here and follow the instructions here for burning it to a CD-ROM or DVD.

HTH.

Re: Backing up Windows from Linux

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you very much HTH.

That now makes more sense to me. The question is how much damage can I do?
I take it the theory is that I load linux from the DVD and then mount (as you put it) the hard disc, cunningly locate the C-Drive and take all the vital data off it and then reload windows and restore the data.
I suppose the danger occurs when I am trying to mount the hard disc because I have no idea what any of those commands mean. If I add a "/r" to your commands as suggested above, will it make everything safe?

Love, me