Well, if you have access to a friendly IT person who knows what they're doing -- as JackR suggested -- hell, yeah, that would be your best bet. One other, fairly easy / user-friendly option (zero hardware expertise needed) you might consider -- even if you ultimately decide against doing it yourself -- would be to burn a bootable BartPE CD on your home laptop. Then boot up the Gateway with that CD and view your HD with Bart's own built-in Windows Explorer clone. Plug in any external USB hard drive or even a USB flash drive and you're back in business... transfer all the data you need. Your Gateway and your laptop don't need to have the same version of Windows. And you don't need a 2nd desktop, swapping a drive, etc. I used that method when my main trading laptop's HD crashed last May, to save lots of key files not already backed up. Worked great. Whatever you do, good luck with your data recovery.
Bart's PE is extremely useful! Here's a few links that may make a boot recovery disk easier - uses Barts PE as well but less "building" involved. Either way these "rescue discs" are extremely useful! http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ http://www.ubcd4win.com/ Also - many linux distros that you boot from cd can now access ntfs volumes without damaging data - such as ubuntu.
If you saw any part of the Windows boot process then the hard drive cannot be toast (e.g. crashed) because Windows is read from the hard drive (as opposed to the BIOS startup screen) That being the case then I agree with the posters that suggest either mounting as a second or slave drive in a working computer or if you want something even simpler follow the advice and buy an external drive case enclosure (usb), stick the drive in there and then attach (via usb cable) to a working computer. If the hard drive has errors in some critical windows files then it is quite possible that the rest of the data is fine and you just need to copy it. I recently had a hard drive go crap on me, first thing I did after mounting it as a slave drive was to make a complete image copy of it. Then I ran chkdsk - 99% of my data was intact, I simply copied it to a good drive and then got rid of the bad one. Edit: Also agree with the BartPE idea, although you will still need somewhere else to copy the data too (perhaps a network drive)? Edit2: You can run chkdsk in read-only mode so that it tells you how many errors there are without actually touching anything. In fact that is the default if you dont specify /F
Check your independent computer stores, see if they have a USB external drive enclosure, 2.5" & 3.5", no casing for quick hookups. Use your laptop or take it to work plug it into USB port and move your document folders and whatever else you want to save. $15 $20. If it still partially boots probably a bad sector or corrupt boot files. At least you will be able to see the files. Try it.
Guys, I appreciate all the help and comments on this thread. It turned out the problem was I have two hard drives in my computer and for some reason, my system was booting to the slave drive for some reason and it was coming up with an error. I had someone write to the bios to ignore the slave drive and no everything is fine. Although I do plan on getting an external drive ASAP just in case so I don't have to worry about this shit. I think the click noise was the computer switching over to the slave drive. Not sure. Either way, I'm a very happy camper! Thanks again for everyone's input.
Glad to hear Mav... Well FWIW, I lost a laptop drive (not a hardware failure, stupid windows corruption) a while back and was able to recover files with the following software: http://www.r-tt.com/ It was good software, I bought the network edition, booted a second machine up with the software (open source linux boot), put in the IP Addy of the laptop with the bad drive... got all my files that I needed, and reinstalled the OS. It worked great, and thier tech support was awesome... I had a question and they responded within two hours on Thanksgiving day (not located in US) cheers
THere are many data recovery specialists on Google, easily findable. I will tell you what to do the next go round. There is a push button 500 gb backup drive that you can use to copy your drive each week. It costs less then $200 I believe. Lets say you back up your drive with this item and then there is a hard drive crash. You can simply go to a office depot, buy a new drive and be working again in a matter of hours. . .
at online costco but you have to be memeber to order; Maxtor 1TB One Touch III Triple Interface Hard Drive USB, FireWire 400 & FireWire 800 $449.99 Item # 130528 Shipping & Handling included *
What do you guys think about this hard drive? http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1538960&CatId=2422