Help getting data off laptop

[Dunbar]

Hey all, bear with me here, I'm helping my brother with this problem with his new laptop (over the phone.) He got a brand new P4 Vaio laptop and now it won't boot into Windows, apparently an AGP driver error on startup. He needs to transfer some directories off his C drive, fortunately he has a D partition. I had him try a 98 boot disk and the xcopy command in DOS to transfer the directories. Problem is the "dir" command only sees things like checkdisk and other executables. Any help in getting these files moved off the computer?

 

[Abzstrak]

sounds like since its a new computer its probably running XP... and therefore probably NTFS. Booting off of a win98 boot disk wont allow U to see the harddrive, only the ram drive the win98 bootdisk creates with chkdsk and all that goodness on it.



the easiest way if running win2k or XP is to boot of the CD into the recovery console and copy the files using dos commands. Or another easy way is to pick up a 2.5" to 3.5" harddrive adapter (about $5) and pop the harddrive in a working desktop and take care of business.

 

[Dunbar]

Thanks, that sounds right. But I don't think he has a full copy of XP, just a recovery disk I told him to borrow a full copy of XP to boot off of. When he boots off the disk Sony supplied (read: recovery disk) he only gets the safemode, last known good configuration (which didn't work) and those options. The desktop HD adapter is a last resort I guess, OEM's suck nowadays. I told him the first thing he needs to do when it's fixed is move My Documents to the D partition!