Recovering Files

[NoNameRequired]

I gave my brother a call this past week and he mentionned having lost files on his computer. He was trying to fix a simple problem on his friend's computer and used his power cord for doing so. When he was plugging back the power cord into his own computer, he did not noticed it was ON. Boom ! he says. He got a new power supply and box. Now the computer turns on but I suspect something else got killed during the power incident. I'm guessing either the RAM or the hard-disk might of gotten corrupted. We managed installing Windows XP, but now it is reporting corruption in the Windows/System folder. I'm not formatting again since he wants to recover some files he had in there before frying his computer. So the question is :

Could I simply take his hard-disk, plug it in my computer and try to recover the files ? I currently have Windows ME installed. I probably could not, he was on NTFS and the Windows XP installation is still on there. I wonder how my computer would take it. I could install Windows 2000 but I still doubt I could access his hard-disk.

Any suggestions ?

Thank You.

 

[Swilo]

You can go to www.sysinternals.com and download the free demo of their NTFS for 98 program, it should work from ME too. Gives read access to NTFS partitions, but not write. Would certainly allow file recovery if you put his drive in your comp, assuming it isn't completely trashed.

 

[Rapmaster]

With Windows 2000 on another machine, yes you could get into the NTFS partition

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you could also try installing XP on top of the existing installation...

 

[NoNameRequired]

A stroke of luck hit us. Windows XP booted correctly totally out of the blue. I rushed back home to burn all the recovery programs I could find on the internet. After trying a few, GetBack NTFS proved to be the most useful out of all these shareware programs. I did not find any of the files he is looking for. Unfortunate. It did find some really old files dating from a few months... I guess we did not get so lucky and his personal files got overwritten.

Anyway, he has some busted 40GB which did have his personal files at one point. We shall try that one tommorow and see how it goes.