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

yet another problem

[(Anonymous)]

I am sure your wall board of my problems but now I have a new one. (You also going to have to accept some typos because I'm talking to my computer and this is the second time I've attempted to write this posed).

I thought to myself I need to back up my own data so I'm going to get myself an external hard drive. When I was in the shop the sales assistant persuaded me that it was not very difficult to remove a hard drive with a screwdriver so I bought a separate hard drive and Mount thinking that if I was lucky amount would be compatible with the corrupted hard drive. Of course it wasn't. However, I can't get Windows to recognize my new external hard drive so that I can format it. It claims to have initialised it but it still won't see it. Anyone got any bright ideas? Also, the sales assistant suggested that I could download a program called "mini Pe" and that this would boot Windows and allow me to get at the data. Anybody come across such a miracle programme? It seems a bit easier than fiddling with Linux (although I have learnt awful lot from the above posts, thank you very much)

Love,
me

Re: yet another problem

[verazea]

It's difficult to understand what the problem might be without knowing what you've done or what the error is.

Does this disk show up in the logical disk manager? (control panel -> administrative tools (you might need to go into performance and maintenance to see this if you are in the control panel category view) -> computer management -> disk management -> storage)

If it shows up but it is all unallocated, this could cause this and you need to partition the disk. To do so, right click on the unallocated space bit, select new partition,then you probably want primary partition. Set how big you want it (you can make the entire disk one partition if you want) and then format it. You'll have to use NTFS if the partition is over 32gb in size (microsoft crippled the format tool so fat32 won't format successfully above that size).