Is there any way to retrieve this data?

My dad's laptop hard drive is failing, and it doesn't boot into windows. It just gets stuck at the welcome screen and loops over and over. He has some important documents on there that we need to retrieve but we can't get into windows. Any other ways of getting that data out?

 

You can download a copy of knoppix onto a cd and boot to it, browse the hd and copy what ever you need off

 

unfortunately, my laptop's cd drive is out of order so we dont have one of those at our disposal. Could we get a hard drive enclosure, take out the hard drive and connect it to my laptop via usb and take it out from there?

 

Yes. Probably the best plan.

Or you might be able to boot a live linux distro from USB

 

It might also be the drive is not failing and yYou might also be able to repair the damage using a Windows Disc (xp, use recovery console, vista or win 7 use the WinPE recovery options.

In my experience, at least half of the cases like yours are fixed by running a simple chkdsk /r

 

when we called dell, they asked us to do a pre boot system test by holding the fn key and powering up, anyway it failed the hard drive test and my dad was reluctant to send them our computer because he has alot of important/personal info on the HD, so they are sending us a new one.

Im guessing the hard drive is dead/dying because it wont boot into windows, but as an above poster mentioned that we can use a hard drive enclosure to retrieve it?

 

If it's just dying, you may be lucky using the enclosure to retrieve the data. If it's already dead, there is still the option of using those specialized services of data recovery, but they're very expen$$$ive.

 

The Dell utility probably is reading some bad sectors, which might indeed be a signal the drive is beginning to go

However, that does not mean a chkdsk /r will not at least revivie it enough to get windows up and running and get your data

Also, you never mentioned what kind of drive it is (or computer). If the drive is an sata drive you can drop it in any computer with an extra sata controller and sata power connnector by buying a $2 sata cable (or borrowing one from a different device). Both 3.5 and 2.5 sata drives use the exact same cables.

If it is a 2.5 pata drive, then you would need either an enclosure or a 3.5 to 2.5 adapter.

If it is spinning up to the Windows Welcome scream and rebooting, the drive is at least partially accessible. Data retrieval is pretty easy to do in these cases. Those data retrieval companies come in handy when the drive isn't spinning or recognized, though

 

okay this was very weird but we managed to get out the data
Basically what happend was we booted into safe mode, for some reason the desktop or explorer.exe wouldn't show, but mccafe antivirus loaded up and from there we were able to open firefox (through visit mccafes website), and from firefox we went to file > open, which opened the file explorer and we were able to copy everything from there to my external.

very strange, i know.

 

not really strange, something is wrong with some files that are used when loading in normal mode. Safe Mode bypasses most of the startup stuff (drivers included), loads only what is necessary to run.

 

Hmm. Could have had a virus that changed your shell...either way, glad you got your data.