Got a laptop here with the blue screen of death upon start up (can't do anything but turn it back off, useless) I advised a reformat but my friend said she wants to get some stuff back (i guess it's important) is it true that some places can extract data in situations like this?

Hi,

Depends on what is causing the BSOD. If it is a corrupt Windoze installation, then you can try booting with a DOS disk or another CD-ROM and getting to a C: and reading the files. If it is NTFS, you may need to get a module that will allow you to read an NTFS disk.

I have done that sort of miracle with Novell networks, a DOS boot disk, and a NTFS reading module. Then again, I had a network handy to do these sort of things.

If not, you can try also booting a Linux CD-ROM, such as Knoppix, and recovering the files that way. It would again free up a floppy-disk port, or perhaps support a network card for network recovery.

You can also try to put the hard drive into another computer, and loading it up from there. You might need to do some permissions management on the device first, before it lets you read it.

If the BSOD is because the hard drive has physical faults, on the last legs, then it is pretty much toast. It is very hard to put scrambled eggs back into the shell.

This is an unfortunate, yet very profound reason that a sound backup strategy is crucial, even for the home user.

Christian

thanks for the knowledge

I have a huge problem. My computer is stuck with the blue screen or stop message and it won't move past that. After "dumping", it restarts and goes through the cycle again and again. I'm pretty sure it's from a virus that I got from MSN because a couple of my friends are facing the same problem. The thing is, I want to reformat but I have some stuff on my computer that I really need. Is there any way for me to recover that stuff? By the way, I am not in the least bit computer literate, so if you do have a reply, could you tell me in regular English? Lol. Thank you so much.

There is a free dos program out there called NTFS4DOS that I have used to recover drives that have blue screened. boot the system with the disk and run the check disk utility If the Blue screen was caused by file errors this will sometimes fix problem and allow you back into windows.

Don't forget to run the Windows scandisk utility set to correct errors after you get back in.