Recovering data

Hello once again,Yet another question.

A freind of mine has a dell PC,Recently she was having problems with her new Dell wireless router she bought in order to connect other wireless devices she purchased.

She spoke to dell and basically there instructiosn for her to turn off all antivirus/firewall protection led to her getting a virus in the boot sector of XP Home edition.Now she has alot of important info on her PC that can not be lost and asked me for help.So i wanted to know if there is any way i can recover her files via use of a program of some sort that can possibly collect the files and burn them to blank cd-r's?If there is any program such as this it would be awsome.

Also note Dell Suport told her to try to "repair" XP home via use of the install CD but this failed and would could not fix the problem.HEr only alternative would be spending about $1000 to have it done professionally.Thanks as always and hope for good news :)

This is a reminder to everyone else that backups are important. Through the years, I have made this same mistake severl times. Since CDRW has come along, backup has become a lot easier. I now backup My Documents, email address book and bookmarks every couple of weeks.

Now for the problem at hand. I think her windows installation is toasted. That would mean that you will have to access her data from externally. I can suggest a couple methods.

One would be to boot to Linux and copy critical files to CD.

Another is to remove her HD and change pin settings to slave and install it in your computer. You may have to go to bios to make sure that the drive is recognized by your computer. Once that is accomplished you should be able to save critical files.

With the Dell in this condition, you will need the Windows Key for a fresh install. Unless your friend was smart enough to keep that information in her records, you will need to contact Dell tech support for the key.

Good luck.

Hey EFC thanks for the info,Heh yes i know about the imprtence of backups i actually had just told her after installing a new 200Gig hard drive that i recommend making a complete backup after she completes installing all her programs.

I thought about switching the drive to slave but i wanted to ask here first as i wasnt sure if the virus could somehow get onto the new main drive which would start the problem all over again.

I will attempot to give this a try first and if it fails i will try boot to linux.Also have another question.I have a version of linux called "Slax-Linux" that is a linus OS that boots from CD would this provide the same functions as "boot to linux" ?

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Originally Posted by bhxtyrant

I have a version of linux called "Slax-Linux" that is a linus OS that boots from CD would this provide the same functions as "boot to linux" ?

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Sorry, I don't know anything about Slax-Linux. It is worth a try. You can test it on your machine before installing her drive. Boot to linux and see if you are able to copy files to another location.

Forgot to deal with one of your questions. You should not have to worry about a virus migration to your HD as long as you are just copying files from one location to another. It would be a good idea to use your anti-virus software to scan the slave.

You can repair the bootsector using the XP install cd. Boot to the recovery console and run the fixboot and fixmbr commands which will remove the bootsector virus.

Thanks Curio :) i actually tried this once already but it failed but at the time i only ran "fixboot" i didnt run "fixmbr" so perhaps thats why it didnt help.I'll give this a try.

Good luck - if you can let us know which BS Virus is on it perhaps there are other options but the recovery console is actually very good at this and when it recognises the broken boot sector it will be able to re-establish the partition information too if that was lost.

And as a precaution, do use an anti-virus. AVG is one free, not so resource intensive option.