A quick rundown of the saga so far: During a routine windows 8.1 update on my relatively new Lenovo laptop, there was a disk error message and Windows attempted unsuccessfully to fix the problem.
Now on startup Windows cycles through "preparing automatic repair...diagnosing your PC...Attempting Repairs" The attempts are unsuccessful, and there are no restore points.
Lenovo sent me free Win 8.1 pro recovery disks overnight...BUT I want to copy my personal files before wiping everything out! I made a Puppy Linux live CD from another computer, it booted fine and I found and copied a few files to an external HDD, but the "User" folder(s) containing most of my files are nowhere to be found (I checked all 6 partitions). I haven't backed up files recently...sigh...lesson learned...
I have run Lenovo Diagnostic to check for HDD bad sectors - no bad sectors.
Is there another program or method to try to recover my files before reinstalling Windows?
Now on startup Windows cycles through "preparing automatic repair...diagnosing your PC...Attempting Repairs" The attempts are unsuccessful, and there are no restore points.
Lenovo sent me free Win 8.1 pro recovery disks overnight...BUT I want to copy my personal files before wiping everything out! I made a Puppy Linux live CD from another computer, it booted fine and I found and copied a few files to an external HDD, but the "User" folder(s) containing most of my files are nowhere to be found (I checked all 6 partitions). I haven't backed up files recently...sigh...lesson learned...
I have run Lenovo Diagnostic to check for HDD bad sectors - no bad sectors.
Is there another program or method to try to recover my files before reinstalling Windows?