Member Avatar for blekk0

Hi guys,

I am hoping somebody out here can help me.

I think I downloaded some sort of virus and it has corrupted my windows. I can't boot up into windows anymore and I can't access my documents. :sad:

I am going to reinstall windows, but I want to back up these documents to my external hard drive.

I need a program that I can boot from CD and let me access my hard drive as well as give me support to backup files to an external USB drive.

Somebody please help me. :cry:

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Dani AI

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For and anyone who finds this thread later: the safest approach is to avoid any operation that writes to the infected drive and use a bootable rescue environment (a Linux live CD/USB or a WinPE/BartPE rescue disk) or remove the drive and attach it to a working machine. That preserves the current state and minimizes the chance of overwriting recoverable files.

A practical, low-risk workflow technicians use:

  1. Boot from rescue media and confirm the internal drive is visible (use lsblk or fdisk -l).
  2. Mount the Windows partition read-only and mount the external USB target.
sudo mkdir -p /mnt/windows /mnt/usb
sudo mount -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/windows
sudo mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb
  1. Copy important locations (Desktop, Documents, Favorites, Outlook PSTs). rsync is reliable for this:
rsync -av --progress /mnt/windows/Users/username /mnt/usb/backup/

A GUI file manager in the live environment works equally well for simple copies. Always verify the backup by opening several files and checking total sizes.

If the partition will not mount or files look corrupted, make a full disk image first (ddrescue) and run recovery tools (TestDisk/PhotoRec) against the image rather than the original disk. If SMART reports failures or the drive makes unusual noises, professional recovery is recommended. Do not reinstall Windows or run repair utilities that write to the disk until backups are confirmed. What suggested — using bootable rescue media — is the method that normally resolves this kind of “can’t boot but need files” scenario.

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Member Avatar for santfekuss

Look for a program called 'Knoppix' never tried it as yet but its an operating system on cd I believe, and you can access your hard drive and burn it onto cd.
If you get stuck PM me and I'll post it to you.

Member Avatar for blekk0

Thanks, problem solved :mrgreen:

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