I'll be honest it's not something I've done myself and I'd have to be relaying instructions from others.
Not possible with a laptop, as it requires you to physically remove the hard drive from your faulty machine and transpose it into a working machine.
However if you're now able to boot the faulty machine then we can progress without the need to slave your hard drive.
If you don't mind me asking, how did you manage to get it going?
You know? I'm not exactly sure what I did that finally worked. I kept trying the options in the F8 menu and the F10 menu. It finally booted back up and I did a search and was able to see that the business folder that I need was there, but I couldn't get to it. I didn't lose any of my photos. A lot of my folders are still there, but the items that I saved in them aren't there. One of the things I did was to go to the HP website and look up my computer to see if they had any info. They had a patch for the Windows Service Pack 1 that addressed the lsass.exe issue, but I don't think that that is what fixed the problem because I was only able to download that to a CD and I wasn't able to get the computer to load that cd. Luckily, I have a backup of the business files, but I made it in January so I've lost everything since then. I need to try to get those back. Can you help with that?
Oh, one more thing, the HP website also showed me how to go in and reassing ownership of certain files or something. I did that, but I still can't find the files that I need.
~awells
To be quite frank I've never come across a situation like this before, and can't think what might have caused it. From the nature of the problem and the way in which it was resolved I'd guess at some kind of intermittent hardware problem, but I could be well wide of the mark.
The files will certainly be on your disk, provided they haven't been written over (the less you use your computer the better in that regard), but recovering them is a job best done by someone who specialises in that subject.
There are companies that deal with file recovery, and for something as important as business files that is certainly the route I'd recommend (there are file recovery softwares, but these are less reliable and may make recovering your files much harder if they fail). Once recovered I'd strongly recommend you to get your hard drive checked out at a repair shop, re-format your disk and re-install your OS.
I can ask around if you wish and see if I can get any recommendations for file recovery services.
Gary,
Thanks so much for all of your help. I think at this point I'm just going to take my computer in to be fixed. I really don't want to chance ruining the files forever.
Thanks again for all your help!
~awells
Make sure your Repair Shop doesn't just do a re-format and re-install, they're liable to do just that if you're not careful and then the files would be lost forever, ensure they understand there are business files on your computer and its essential you recover them.
Sorry we didn't get a happy outcome.
Good luck with recovering your lost files.
