Need to backup data before working on Win7 laptop

[balloonshark]

My niece's computer will not boot. I just found out she has videos and pics of a friend that suddenly passed away last year on the computer that mean a lot to her. I need to back these up to a cd, dvd or usb stick. I'm hoping the backup or recovery program runs from a cd or usb stick. Can you please help me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I use a bootable Linux distro, either on CD/DVD or a USB stick, and a portable external HD.

Boot linux, then plug in the external HD.

Then open the filesystem on the internal non-booting disk, and select contents, and then copy to the external HD.

 

[balloonshark]

Thank you Larry. Will that method also copy files to a thumb drive? I mainly use my external HDD with eSata and the 2 times I tried it with USB it didn't work.

 

[lxskllr]

Yea, same thing. You could even burn them to an optical disc, but optical discs kind of suck.

 

[balloonshark]

Great to hear! Thanks 🙂.