Windows 7 a real mess

jay69

Active Member
Well, my nephew dropped his laptop with win 7 (Dell) and their software/recovery stuff is cr*p (you don't get an actual windows disk when you buy the product - thanks Dell!) and it won't boot so I tried to help him recover gigs of music etc from the "bad disk". Using win 8.1 I was able to buy some software to recover the needed files from his old HD. I set it up to do so and it found the files and I left it overnight to "recover" them. That's where things got dicey. It seems that he used the default win7 file structures from msft (documents/music/videos ""libraries" and they were under his user/user name section of system files like all windows installations. I learned a long time ago to NOT use these default windows libraries/folders for such files to avoid the very issues I ran into recovering his files. It seems since these files were part of his old HD "system" folders they will NOT show up as recovered on my HD with a different user/etc which is my user info. Adding him as a user on my computer and logging him in did not help. Does anyone have any ideas how to get around this limitation ? If I could "restore/fix the mbr on his old HD that might do it but I have already spend $$$ on programs that say they can do this but actually cannot which you do not find out till after you buy them. I bought a new HD and another copy of win 8.1 for him but would love to be able to get all the files he needs off the old HD. Any suggestions appreciated.
 
Maybe boot a Linux CD and copy them off that way. With the CD you don't have or want to install the OS
 
Maybe boot a Linux CD and copy them off that way. With the CD you don't have or want to install the OS
Thanks for this suggestion. When i put the physical disk HD in the dell it won't post because of the HD fail. If I boot from a linux cd it may boot without a HD in the dell case and I will see if it helps to boot linux cd from there and then drop the HD in ? I have never used linux so there is a learning curve to boot/recover files from a failed hd. Worth a try.
 
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