I've got a laptop that died but the hard drive is still good. It's a Win2000 pro install on a FAT32 formatted drive. The laptop is dead... no boot, no power up.. nada... zilch... boat anchor.

I need to get the data off the hard drive and dump it to a desktop drive, or another laptop drive. I can put the drive into another laptop I have available to me, but the configuration is different enough that it'll lock up before it finishes booting. I could probably do a repair from the Win2000 cd, but damn... I can't back this stuff up first and trusting Microsoft stuff like that just gives me the willies

I have Ghost 2000, so I could go LPT to LPT but that's butt slow. I only have 3-4 gigs of data on the drive to take off, but thats several hours over parallel ports.

Something I've thought will work is find a minimal live cd linux distro, boot from it and use samba to share the drive and just download it to another computer. I haven't been able to find a live cd distro that offers samba on it though. I could probably make one if I wanted, but I'd rather not spend the entire weekend working on this if I don't have to.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Basically, I'd like to boot from cd, have FAT32 read capability, networking (ethernet), and file sharing. I don't need no steekin GUI... but pointy clicky is cool too I don't mind spending a little (under $100)money for something useful.

Jim

Why don't you just take the hard drive out of the dead laptop and connect it directly to a pc. Some laptops have identical connectors and some use smaller connectors than the ones used in desktops, but there are converters availible.

That would be the easiest solution for me, cos my first computer tool is a screwdriver

Try Knoppix 3.1. It's a Linux Distro that boots from a CD.

Something else you can try. Install Ghost on the good laptop with its hard drive and make a ghost boot disk with network support. Then swap out the drives and boot from the ghost disk. This way you can map a drive via ethernet to the desktop machine and create the ghost image. Then all you would have to do is use ghost explorer to get the files you need out of the ghost image.

Thats cool! I didn't know Ghost would do that. I've used the ghost boot disk thing a few times, but it's only offered lpt. I'll dig around the readme files to see how to add network support to it. Thanks for the info.

Jim

OK.. I was wondering why I hadn't seen the options for TCP on my ghost program. It wasn't in ghost 2000

It is however in ghost 2003, which is in my hand now I just did a test run to get a feel for it. I was able to make an image of my test machine and transfer it over my network just fine. My hard drive only had 670MB worth of data on it, but only took 2 minutes and 30 seconds to complete!

This is the way to go for me! thanks to everyone for thier suggestions!

Jim