Need a simple, direct way to look at files on a hard drive when the system hard drive died

Factual Questions
1

So for the second time in 2 years, it’s looking like my boot hard drive has died. Not 100% sure yet, but when I try booting, I get a black screen with “Reboot and Select Proper Boot Device or Insert Boot Media in Selected Boot Device & press a key.”

It’s truly strange, as the computer has been working great. The only reason I rebooted was that I hadn’t rebooted in a while, and my speakers were buzzing, and I know a reboot fixes that. (There’s some app I have that does something to my sound driver that makes things buzzy, and so far I haven’t figured out just which app it is, but I know a reboot fixes things so…I rebooted.)

Anyway, it came right back with the above message, and I’m afraid my hard drive might be toast. If anyone has something else for me to try on that one, please let me know. I’ve already checked the cables, rebooted about a gazillion times, changed around the SATA cables to see if that magically made my hard drive work, etc etc. It does boot from a bootable CD, so I know it’s not anything overly goofy.

The good news is that I have backups. Two of 'em, in fact, on two separate internal hard drives. The bad news is that the #@@#!% backup software I have (EaseUS, if anyone is interested) comes up, find my backups, asks me which I’d like to us, but nothing ELSE about the stupid backups. Like, for example, a file date, which would tell me which of the backups is more recent.

In the old days, it was fairly easy to boot to a command prompt and just go look at your files, but apparently that’s not so easy anymore. At least, the Windows boot CD I have and the EaseUS recover CD don’t appear to let me do anything like that.

I made a bootable WinPE USB key using the instructions here, but my machine won’t boot from it. I’m not sure why. The machine is 3 years old, is it possible that it’s not set up to boot from USB?

Argggh. All I want to do is see which of my @#$@# backup files are newer. How can I do that without spending the next week trying various methods only to have them not work?

2

Actually, sometimes, changing SATA drives does work.
I can’t advise much about this; but, since you only have two backups to consider — and I assume you have swapped in a new hard disk — why not try one, and if it seems to be the latest, keep it, and if not, try the other ?
To find out if the machine will boot from USB, go into BIOS when it starts up. Change it there if that selection is available.

3

If you are familiar with linux, it’s fairly easy to boot to a linux live CD/DVD and poke around on the disk and see what files are there, copy the ones you want to a USB stick, etc.

It’s also possible to make a windows PE CD/DVD. I always use linux since I already have the disk available so I’ve never tried to do any sort of recovery using windows PE.

It’s possible that the machine may not have it.

It’s also possible that you just haven’t enabled that option in the BIOS. Some machines have a specific option for it. With others you have to go into the boot options and configure the USB as an option in the search order. It varies quite a bit so it’s difficult to give specific instructions here. Basically, go into the BIOS and poke around and see if you can find the USB boot option anywhere.

4

So as it turns out, my hard drive isn’t hosed; a little more fiddling with the BIOS made it clear that something had reset the BIOS to the defaults. Putting them back where they should be fixed everything.

That said, I’d still like to know the most direct way to getting a bootable… something going. I’m pretty sure my BIOS just doesn’t support booting from USB. So WinPE on a CD? Is there anything simpler?

I’d rather have that over Linux, if for no other reason that my fingers type ‘dir’ faster than ‘ls’ :D. But I’ll keep that in mind as well.

5

After a crash my computer very occasionally has reset the BIOS; best practice is to save a BIOS profile ( if allowed ) when it’s running well, or after a BIOS update, and instantly restore from that rather than trying to remember memory ram settings etc…
As for a rescue CD, Hiren’s Boot CD may help you.

Others are Trinity Rescue Kit, System Rescue CD, PMagic, Plop Linux, UBCD503, etc. judging by old copies squirrelled away on a baby drive for whenever I need to aid Windows users. + Clonezilla and GParted etc…

6

Will Hiren’s Boot CD let me view the contents of a hard drive running Windows 7 64bit? Because the one I’m familiar with is BartPE and I think that one is only for a 32bit OS.

7

As it turns out, I actually have all the BIOS settings written down and nicely documented. Of course, it took a call to tech support to remind me of that (:smack:) but once I figured it out it only took a few minutes to reset it.

Glad that’s all it was. I was not looking forward to spending the weekend recovering my hard drive.

8

The simplest and most reliable way is to get a USB ESATA docking station. Get one that handles 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives. Then just plug your old desktop or laptop drive in and plug in the USB cable. You can read your files from any working PC.

This one is similar to mine. I got it a little cheaper off Ebay. It’s good insurance to recover files off a non working computer.

9

When did you last change the CMOS battery? If it’s more than 3 years ago it’s worth changing it.

10

Agreed. I don’t keep any but temporary files waiting to be transferred on my primary drive.
If something goes wrong it takes 20 minutes to reinstall Opensuse, rather than spend hours working it out. All the applications are still in the home directory anyway.

11

this is a good suggestion.

make a linux live CD/DVD and use it to find out how to use drives and copy or edit/read files. practice it often enough to remember how to do it.

12

To me, “simplest” does not involve physically removing the drives from the computer. Blech. I’d rather shove forks in my eyes.

I highly suspect this is in my near future, although the tech did admit there was a button on the back of the machine that would reset the BIOS that I could have hit by accident. WTF? Stupid design IMO.