Hello - laptop problems (sigh). Please read my Problem Description and then go to My Questions at the end.

PROBLEM DESCRIPTION:

I tried to start my laptop this morning but I was faced with the Blue Screen of Death (with the following message):

A problem has been detected…follow these steps:

Disable or uninstall any anti-virus, disk defragmentation or backup utilities. Check your hard drive configuration and check for any updated drivers. Run CHKDSK /F to check for hard drive corruption, and then restart your computer.

Technical Information: STOP: 0×00000024 (0×00190203, 0×82F29390, 0xC0000102, 0×00000000)
——————————————

MY QUESTIONS:
1) Is there anything I can do myself, with just my laptop? Once I am on the Blue Screen of Death, the laptop doesn’t allow me to input anything, but if I press F2 before the Blue Screen of Death appears, I get into something called teh ‘Setup Utility’. Is there anything I can do here?
2) If I decide not to (or cannot) do 1), and instead do a data recovery and reconfigure the hard drive, is there any way I can do a data recovery myself, using another laptop? How do I go about this? Are there any step-by-step instructions on the web?
3) Or should I just get the PC repair place to do a data recovery and a windows reinstall (they suggested if I wanted to save money I could do the latter myself). I just came from there, they want a lot of money. If anyone is in London (UK) and can suggest a cheap data recovery specialist, please let me know.

Ok there’s a lot of questions here, I hope someone can help me!

Two weeks ago, on Friday the thirteenth, I fell into my school’s pond by some catastrophic accident (I wasn’t pushed).

To cut the long story short, all my belongings went into the water, including a relatively new (less than one year old) laptop. D:

When I took out my laptop’s hard drive and connected it to another computer, all the data showed up inside and I could open and view documents.

However, it stopped working after a few minutes and it hasn’t been spinning ever since.

My dad helped me to look around for solutions to recover my data, it seems that the professionals that do it would charge hundreds, even thousands for data recovery.

Does anyone know of any ‘home-grown’ method for me to get my hard drive working (at least temporarily) again?

Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! (:

What I want to know is, is there any software that I can backup my hard drive to a dvd the way that HP and Compaq does theirs? Create a restore dvd you might say. I have set up a clean copy of Windows XP exactly the way I want it with all of my personel software included. Now I want to create a dvd that I can simply insert and restore my computer exactly back to this way if it ever crashes. All the software I found requires reinstalling windows first and then doing a restore. I want the dvd to do the job for me and just install everything back like it is now without having to reinstall everything first. SoftThinks makes the recovery dvd’s like I am talking about for HP and Compaq. Hopefully I haven’t confused you to much? Any help will be gladly appreciated. Thanks!

I want to restore a particular web browser session that happened durring a specific week in September. The web session ocurred on a secured banking website (i.e. behind a firewall and encryption). I want to know if certain transaction confirmation information from that session can be recovered from my hard drive. What software do I need and what hardware do I need to do this myself. The information is not yet worth hiring a pro company to do the recovery if even possible. Nothing has been manually deleted from the hard drive in the past month at least. I own the machine and am not interested in spying on anyone, I just need the information to prove a bank screwed up to the tune of a couple thousand dollars and my perfect credit.

i have formatted my hard drive when i installed windows 7 and i cant do system recovery will the recovery disk restore the software that was installed at the hp factory?

I was running a defrag program on a hard drive and accidentally copied some data to the hard drive at the same time. My computer completely froze before I had a chance to cancel it.

When I tried to turn my computer it wouldn’t restart and just froze on the loading Windows 2000 screen after 8 bars showed up. I unplugged the hard drive and was surprised that the computer then started up fine. The reason I was surprised is the OS is not on that hard drive.

I then powered up my computer and plugged in the damaged hard drive to an external device so it shows up as an external drive. When I go to it I see it as having nothing at all (0 bytes free and 0 total).

What should my next step be in the morning? Should I run disk check, defrag, or anything else first? Or should I run a disc recovery program first?

I had pictures I deleted out of my recycling bin and since then I reformatted/went back to factory settings twice. I have vista with a recovery hard drive separate from the other one. Is there any software I can use to get it back?.. The pictures were deleted 2 years ago too

Is there any way a hard drive could be used for years and then not have anything left on it but a few windows icons left on it even with recovery software? The drive was not formatted or wiped. I used a few different programs to recover and nothing but some windows icons was found. Also the drive was clicking the night before and having read/write errors within windows xp.
Is there anyway this could of happen and please provide as much info as you can. Thanks
I have got a new drive but there was stuff on that drive that I would like to recover if I can. Now the drive acts fine and doesn’t click but yet it acts as it was wiped clean. What could of happen.

I just recently got a new PC and I installed my old hard drive as a slave. Unfortunately, I found that I cannot access the files on the drive.

So, I downloaded a recovery software (RecoverMyFiles) but all it does is search the hard drive and return thousands of files with their filenames renamed! The program shows checkboxes where the user is prompted to select the type of files they want to search but I find it inconvenient to find the exact files I need out of the thousands of search results!

All the files I need are contained in only one folder. Is there a software that can recover whole folders instead of just files? HELP!!!

I have an old hard drive that I want to get some stuff from but I don’t want to throw it in my computer. Will file recovery software work on external drives? ie. Flash drives, USB drives, especially USB-IDE drives.
Will some work and some not? Any suggestions?

Ok.. this is weird my hard drive is acting funny.Every time i download some updates and trusted software stuff it beeps and freezes and the time i boot up it takes for EVER and when it does boot all the way, crash.. then i have to go to system recovery and then all that again (but i don’t need to tell you all this) ok.. so that was B4 i hit my computer (getting mad) but not like some crazy freak.(BUT LISTEN) I hit it were the hard drive sits so i know its ok.But my hard drive i don’t think so.. so here is my questions:

can i use a blank disk to copy my whole hard drive to a new one and have vista on it so i don’t have to buy anything?new but the hard drive.

can i use a "hard drive tool" to fix it?

um that’s it….HELP

I used a USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA adapter from Cables to Go to connect the hard drive from my tower pc(running XP) to my new HP Pavilion 9000 laptop loaded with Vista. The hard drive that I connected was the hard drive loaded with the XP OS, and also had a "system restore/recovery" partition on it. It had special recovery software from Emachines (the manufacturer of the PC) I think.

Usually when the Emachines PC is booted, it first shows the main screen with the Emachines logo and also mentions "[F9] for Boot Options] and the like. Then there is a black screen that says "Press [F11] to start recovery __". The "__" is a countdown that always starts from 2 and then goes to 0. When it gets to 0 it always goes to a new screen where it informs you that it is loading Windows XP. I believe the countdown was to inform the user that after 2 seconds, it would be to late to press [F11] and therefore would have to restart the PC in order to perform the System Recovery. Anyway, it no longer behaves the way it should. Now, instead of continuing to the next screen after the count down ends, it posts a new line in the prompt bellow the first one with the same text as the previous line along with a new 2 sec. count down. It repeats the same thing over and over for eternity. I let it cycle through about 300 lines of crap and shut it down. After several more boots, it does the same thing, and the only response to me actually pressing [F11] is that the current line’s count down ends instantly, only to create a new line. Is this because I connected it to a Vista PC? The hard drive definitely works, but why can’t it be booted from? It’s detected by my old PC and it even loads to the "System Recovery" screen, so it must be connecting. Is there some way I can make the hard drive bootable again?

Also, I already tried using the same adapter with my tower PC and tried booting it that way, but it also freezes on the same screen.

Thanks for any help you can give me.

I use a [Toshiba 1GB] compact flash card in my Nikon D2X and the first time I went to download the images, to my horror, there was nothing there. I was able to playback the images on my camera at first, but now, I no longer can. I know a compact flash uses memory on a chip as upposed to a hard drive, which stores data magnetically on a disc. But is it still possible to recover data from one?

and ummm im using DVDs not a hard drive cz i dont have one, so how does it work? i need everytime to back up on a new disc?! doesnt make sense to me :S

My hard drive just decided to fail. the thing still works, but windows doesn’t even recognize it anymore. A friend of mine worked on it for all of five seconds and discovered that the file system read RAW instead of the original NTFS I formatted it with. I’ve search the internet for data recovery software, however, the price tag doesn’t make things any easier. I don’t want to be cheap or anything, I’ll pay the money…but I’m wondering is there a freeware or open source program out there that will do everything that the retail data recovery program can do?
For example: there’s a program called GetDataBack that will restore my files…but is there a free program that will do all GetDataBack (or equivalent) can do?
I’m just curious..
Thanks If at all possible I would like to recover with the directory structure intact…

I’d like to swap out the hard drive on my Compaq Persario desktop computer, running Windows XP. The physical part of it I can handle, but is the software end of it as easy as puting my reformat/recovery disc in the disc drive and then booting up on that to load everything I need to have it run correctly? Also, are there any special considerations to think of when looking for the replacemet hard drive?

Thanks!!

I do NOT want to send my hard drive out if I do not have to. Any ideas???

My laptop was acting up so I ran the system recovery disks and restored it to factory settings. One mistake though…there was a folder of pictures that I didn’t mean to delete. Any chance of getting those back using a data recovery program? What about sending the hard drive off?
Thanks

My old hard drive is corrupted and I want to salvage the files on it using a data recovery program I’ve downloaded. However getting the program to read it is difficult. Do I need to reformat the hard drive? When I go to reformat it says this will erase all data on the disk, but according to other websites I’ve read it should be fine and I should still be able to salvage files. Which is correct?

Hi there,

My girlfriends hard drive has just died and I was wondering..
If any of you know any Data recovery software for Corrupt hard drives?

I can’t seem to find any, and we are not going to pay for a technician to use their own data recovery and spend hundreds on it :(.

Thanks,
Sam

I accidentally formatted my office hard drive and recreated new partitions too. Now, I am messing with my disk to recover some important documents from previously existing partitions. Tried too many professional software in past three days to undelete my lost files.

Anyone can suggest the best data recovery software for me?

I recently suffered the pain of an external 250 GB hard drive crash. So I am looking into investing in remote backups.

carbonite.com and mozy.com both look like great value, but they both require users to install their own proprietary software. I’m not really comfortable with that and of course they only support a limited number of platforms.

Are there any remote backup solutions out there like carbonite / mozy that don’t require you to use their software?

i really need a good software to download that will recover the data from my hard drive, its really important.

thanks

I’m planning to sell my hard drive to a friend of mine and I’m worried if they might recover sensitive data from my hard drive using data recovery software.