Recovering Data from Laptop

How can I recover the data on my laptop’s hard drive if the graphics chip or LCD has died? I only have a white screen with yellow, green, cyan and magenta vertical lines. The DVI, VGA and S-Video outs wont work with either HD LCD in the house, so the graphics chip probably died. I’m returning it to where I bought it from for an exchange, but want to backup my files, or at the very least erase my company files before taking it back. Any ideas? Taking the hard drive out would probably VOID my ability to return it.

If you have an extra machine kicking about you could try clonezilla. itd let you pxe boot the laptop (assuming thats enabled) and image the drive. I suppose once thats done you could  shred the partition.

Where did you buy it from ? what model laptop is it, pm me and ill help you.

Jase

HDD came out easily. I thought there would be seals to break etc… voiding return_ability.

Anyway, my vista desktop picked up both partitions and didn’t even bother me for a password to get my files, which I found weird, since it did ask permission to look at them.

Now, these laptops you buy these days come pre-loaded to the point where you just punch in your user name and vista installs. Is there a way to get the computer back to that point? Am I allowed to format the hard drive? Or should I just delete my files and take it back? I have some ‘tight hole’ company documents and files on there I don’t want anyone to retrieve.

Laptop came with NO recovery disk of any type. Me thinks it might have a flash drive or hidden partition for recovery?

Grab a Microsoft Vista Premium DVD from someone and reinstall it properly when it’s fixed. You’ll get rid of all the brand name crap that comes with it.
If you’ve access from a desktop you can get drivers from the manufacturer site.
It will run faster and cleaner.
AVG & AVG antispyware, AUSdefrag & Foxit reader, Firefox are the only extras you’ll need.

Just did that with a guy’s HP that someone stole and formatted the harddrive. He was blown away at how much faster it was compared to the way it came.
If it’s an Acer you can also get rid of the stupid 2 partition system they insist on using.

I returned it and came home with an HP DV6000 series… I think i’ll do what you recommended and do a clean install of Vista at some point. I don’t know why they think people want Yahoo toolbars, AIM and HP quick launch stuff.

Probably going to use BitDefender instead of AVG though.

[quote=“orangetang”]
I returned it and came home with an HP DV6000 series…[/quote]

These lappies got those very nice imprint finish, and yet they’re quite indestructible. I hope you’re very happy with what you got now.  :wink:

[quote]I think i’ll do what you recommended and do a clean install of Vista at some point. I don’t know why they think people want Yahoo toolbars, AIM and HP quick launch stuff.

Probably going to use BitDefender instead of AVG though.[/quote]

In case you’re wondering about installing Windows XP, here’s the site that shows you how:

forum.notebookreview.com/showthr … 4&t=165319

I cleaned installed my HP dv9500 with XP Pro and the performance is significantly impressive compared with Vista.

Don’t forget to make back up recovery CDs/DVDs, especially if your lappy only came with a recovery partition.

I’ve got an HP DV6700 and it’s been great to me so far.

I’ve still got the factory install of Vista on it, but I’ve been using Ubuntu 7.10 mostly, and just rebooting into Vista to make sure that a webpage renders correctly in IE.

I’ve forgotten the model of my HP… lent it to my business partner and he’s too into WoW to bring it back…

When I describe the capabilities of my laptop to people, I say “It’ll play Oblivion, but not Crysis”.

My advice before you do this is creat a set of backup disk’s THIS WILL SAVE YOU, trust me its worth the 2 hours it takes to make the image and burn it, after that FORMAT that biach. the hp laptop i bought the gf i did this. I walk into the shop at work all the time, and the best advice they gave me was just passed along to you :stuck_out_tongue:

jase

I used Ghost in the past, but since floppy drives are no longer, what do you recommend?

Eso, what graphics chip is in your HP? Mine has the 8400M GS (256MG dedicated), middle of the road I think.

7150m.

Turion or Core 2?

What is leaman _approved harddrive backup utility? I finally got around to finding a Home Premium DVD and doing a clean install on my DV6753, which was a headache because hp.com is brutal and slow at providing drivers.

Anyway, I’ve got Fedora 8, Mandriva 08’ and Ubuntu 7.1 ready (probably going with Fedora for now), so what do you use for imaging drives these days? Is ghost obsolete?

-edit-

downloading hiren’s boot cd 9.3. any advice on a dual boot or easily recoverable vista install with linux?

I’m rocking Vista / Ubuntu 7.10 dualboot on my laptop. Just make yourself a partition (I set up a “system” NTFS partition of like 20gig for Windows, 10 gigs for the linux OS, and then the rest of the drive for “data files”, formatted as NTFS (I think it’s easier to get linux to mount a windows volume than it is the other way around).

I installed Windows first, then just booted from the Ubuntu LiveCD and installed from there. It automagically configured the bootloader to give me the option of booting to Windows with zero fucking around on my part.

Try the Kubuntu and Xubuntu live CDs as well.  I personally don’t like Gnome very much.  I’ve been installing Xubuntu a lot more recently.

Linux doesn’t have an issue reading and writing on a NTFS partition? If that’s the case, I’ll probably just create a 50GB partition for linux, and keep the other 200 for windows. I’ve got external storage for backups and such.

Downloading Kubuntu and Xubuntu live CDs… Any love for Mandriva or Fedora? Or is _ubuntu my best bet for getting started with Linux?

I’m going to want open office, firefox, and gimp.

I think Ubuntu or Kubuntu is your best first choice for Linux.  They have exceptional hardware detection.  Mandriva is also good although I haven’t set-up a dual boot with it.  Fedora is also a good choice.
But, again for a first distro the buntus are it. :sunglasses:

Edit: added later:  the buntus all come with Fire Fox, OO, the GIMP and a dump truck load of other cool applications in the repositories.

I’ve personally grown to like gnome over kde, but it’s not a big deal either.

Anyhow, I really recommend *buntu, just because, especially on a newer laptop, driver availability out-of-the-box is a pretty big issue. I also found throwing queries at Google often landed me with a solution from ubuntu-forums.org if I had any problems. I haven’t used Fedora since it was first splintered from Red Hat, and never used Mandriva so I can’t attest to them.

And yeah, I think just about any modern distribution will be able to read and write to an NTFS volume without any tweaking. And the gimp rules.

50GB is probably far more than you’d need for a linux install. I gave mine a 10GB partition on my laptop, and have used maybe 3GB of it after a month.