Can't recover Samsung R780!!

My R780 has been fine since I bought it from Amazon earlier in the year. Over the last week or so it got noticeably slower. I hadn't installed any software recently. Did a virus scan, defragged my hard disk etc - all to no avail. Sometimes it would boot OK , other times it would simply hang. Yesterday it refused to boot at all. I tried using the F4 option to invoke Samsung recovery but this started up and just froze. I dug out my System Recovery CD that came with the laptop (still in plastic bag) and this gets to the point where it starts to install Win 7 and again just hangs! In desperation (as I needed to acccess some data files urgently) I tried to install Win XP from a CD I had from my previous machine. This installed BUT it installed to the D: drive (my data partition) as there was 'no room' on the C: drive. Now I can boot the PC, in Explorer I can see a C: drive labelled SYSTEM which is empty and an E: drive which is an NTFS partition I cant access at all I also have hardly ny drivers - no Ethernet or Network controllers etc so can't connect to the Internet (writing this on my daughters PC!). Can anyone help! How can I restore my laptop if the recovery solution and the recovery CD dont work?

 

First, to get at those files, I would download Ubuntu Live Linux, put it on a CD and boot from the CD. It won't install anything on the HDD but will allow you to search for files and copy them to a flash drive. In Windows you may be able to see any other partitions by going to Disk Management. It's possible that some partitions have not been provided with drive letters and therefore won't be visible in Explorer (I'm not sure whether XP)

As for installing a new version of Windows 7, I know that Windows 7 likes to archive the previous installation so that users can afterwards get at any files. If there's no space then it's plausible that the installer comes to a halt. I thought that the Samsung recovery solution over-wrote whatever was on C: but perhaps the latest version has changed.

Of course, if the C drive is full then this could explain the deteriorating performance. Windows caches all the updates etc so it will progressively expand to fill the available space. CCleaner will help clear out the unwanted stuff.

John

 

Sorry to appear dense - but not sure (a) exactly what files I would look for and (b) what I'd do with them anyway! I've managed to launch Windows XP Disk Management and this shows that the C: drive is only about 200MB and so it may be taht the size of this drive is stooping the restore of Win 7 (dont knpw how much space I'd need). I'd have hoped that the recovery program would have checked the size of C: first and (even beter) resized the partitition i necessary. Oh well. I also found a RECOVERY partition of 20GB which has no drive letter. I assume this is where the Samsung Recovery Solution is attempting to recover the system from. I tried installing Partition Magic 7.0 (not used for a couple of years) but although this installed it wont run so I cant resize the C: drive in any case! Spent all day on this and still not much closer to recovering my system. Thnaks for your help but I'm not that clear on what I'd do even if I managed to download the program you suggest

 

If you know that all the user data is on D: then you can format C: from your XP installation and try the system restore again.

John