Okay, here's the story.  As you may remember, my boss went on maternity leave about a year-and-a-half ago after giving birth to a ridiculously cute baby girl, whom I call "Squishy."  Squishy's mom is an inveterate record-keeper, and has diligently chronicled Squishy's life via the art of digital photography, amassing a huge amount of pictures in the process.

Last night, their main computer coughed up a hairball and died.  The husband of my boss has some skill with computers, so he ran some BIOS checks on the system and everything reported that the hard drive and grabbed its chest and died.  Of course, this hard drive is the one that has the gazillions of Squishy photos on it, photos that they cannot replace (they have some saved in other places, but just a mere fraction of the total).  Here's the thing: the HD gave no indication there was a problem, no weird sounds, nothing.  It just stopped functioning.  A two-hour call to tech support caused nothing but frustration, of course... frustration and a deep, deep desire to cause an immense amount of physical harm to the techie on the other end of the telephone.

When my boss came in to the Duck U Bookstore today, she told me of the situation.  A quick phone call to her husband convinced me that the HD wasn't actually dead (merely pining for the fjords).  I suggested that they take it out of the computer, put it into an external enclosure, hook it up to one of their other computers and see what happens.  If it doesn't show up, then they know that the offending drive is dead enough that they'd need to take it somewhere to recover the pictures.  If it did show up, then they know that the problem may not be the drive, but the computer itself... and they'd be able to copy the drive to the laptop.

I just got a call from them.  They did put it into an enclosure, and sure enough, it appeared... well, actually, two drives appeared, at which point I slapped my forehead: of course two drives appeared, it was the boot drive from the dead system!  What they were seeing was the C drive and the drive partition where the recovery stuff was kept... which is where the unexpected problem has reared its ugly head.

Y'see, when they look at what was the C drive, there's only a few folders visible, and they don't have anything in them... at least, that's what the laptop is reporting.  What I think is happening, and please correct me if you think I'm wrong, is that the drive isn't showing anything because the copy of Windows that's on it obviously isn't booting, and thus the file system on the drive isn't functional (I may have the technical details wrong, but that's the net result).  Further, the laptop is XP and the version of Windows on the drive is Vista, which probably causes problems too.

They're copying the drive to the laptop, and I've suggested that they go to their other desktop system (which they retired), rip out that hard drive, and plug the problem drive into it.  If everything goes well, the stars align, and a choir of angelic ducks quack out paeans to the heavens, it'll boot up.  At worst, they'll be in the same boat they're in now.

The tech question I have for you, the myriad readers of The Pond, is there some way to access the data from the problem drive if dropping it into a different computer system doesn't work?  If the data was replaceable, I'd just suggest they find Windows on it, delete it, and see if that turns it into a normally-read drive, but I'm just WAGging there, and the chance that it'll turn the drive into a brick seems not insignificant.  Can they pull the data off without the "boot Windows" running?

Another related question: is there some way to boot a laptop from an external hard drive that has Windows on it, sort of a half-arsed version of dual-booting?  If they can do that, then they can save the pics to a different external drive, or burn them to DVD, or something.

Let's brainstorm, my friends.  Hopefully they'll be monitoring this thread, if not tonight then tomorrow, so they'll be able to provide specific details (what folders are showing up, for example) that I don't have, but in the meantime, let me hear your best suggestions.

Posted by: Wonderduck at 08:17 PM | Comments (17) | Add Comment
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