Asus won't boot, trying to save pics with usb

esenef

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Jan 26, 2015
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My asus 1005p crashed. It would not boot, so I got rufus and win7.iso put on usb. It finally booted but it wants to reinstall windows 7 and the tutorials I've seen made it look like I could boot then click and drag to copy files. It ended up freezing in "starting setup" anyways. I am not a computer expert by any means, but got this far and am stuck. Thank you in advance for any help.
 

esenef

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Jan 26, 2015
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Ok, thank you. I haven't tried ubuntu yet. I will let you know how it goes.
 

esenef

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Jan 26, 2015
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So ubuntu worked, my internal hd was not present under devices. I did bring it up in /data by following another tutorial. I managed to save some pictures, but a very small percent. Most of the folders are empty and contain zero files. Is there a way to recover those without overwriting my external hd and deleting the content that is already on there.
 
Maybe you have corrupt filesystem? You can try to repair [From a Windows Installation Image] using the repair utilities you can get a command prompt and run the command:
chkdsk /r

Which will find and repair bad sectors and meta data on the filesystem

If this doesn't fix then you can proceed [carefully] with data recovery tools:

1) Always make an image first. Then try to recover files from the image. Never work directly from the HDD as you may accidentally delete/overwrite some stuff unintentionally. [or if you feel brave, at least mount your hard drive as read only)
Usually I make an image with 'ddrescue'
2) Use recovery programs like 'foremost' or 'photorec' on the image.

The Ubuntu Wiki has a nice article on using these kinds of tools
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery