Booting from LAN / Network boot

That is a very obvious way of retrieving data. I use a laptop HDD enclosed in a casing which I use as a USB device for storage. I wish SONY laptops did not have the screw over the place where the HDD is placed. I cannot open it as the warranty is likely to be void if i do so. And I have to get the faulty DVD drive repaired / replaced somehow in another 20 days.

I already mentioned that my laptop is 11 months old and most laptops have 1 year warranty. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks for a reply. This solution was the first thing that came to my mind. I wish it was possible for me to do, I would not have spent (wasted) a week trying to find options to get the data back.

If someone can come up with a clear cut solution regarding network booting, I will be very thankful.

Cheers

- immortalsoul

"together we grow" - anonymous

Don't worry about the warranty... unless there is a seal on the hard drive, it would be impossible for them to know you removed it from the laptop. Besides, since the hard drive is easily accessible, I doubt removing it would void your warranty anyway... it's not like you have to actually open the laptop to remove it.

Removing the hard drive is no worse than removing the battery or the CD/DVD/ROM/RW/floppy drive.

Oh and another thing... all laptop manufacturers use a screw to secure the hard drive in the laptop. This is to prevent the hard drive from being easily removed when the laptop is running.

an emergency boot cd will allow access to your hd - if it's FAT32, a floppy would do. the cd option is good though - it SHOULD alow you to copy the entire hard drive to another computer via a network or replace/delete whatever is wrong with the laptop

You don't really need an enclosure. You can use a adapter like the: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6812156102

Grumpy

You can open you Laptop with a Linux Live CD and transfer evey thing on your laptop to the home desktop with the lan network connection .


Liloplan.

I have removed the hard drives of many of my client's laptops, put them in an enclosure and copied the data. After that I have never had any problems with the guarantee.

Another option that sometimes works when the internal dvd/cdrom player fails: ask someone arround you if they have an external USB dvd drive. I have connected it to several laptops already and was able to boot from it. If you can boot then I would boot a Ubuntu live CD to copy your files to a USB stick.

You can find step by step instructions here: [url=http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/use-ubuntu-live-cd-to-backup-files-from-your-dead-windows-computer/][/url]

But the instruction on the link above are alreadt a little bit outdated, because the latest Ubuntu will automaticall recognize your harddrive and USB stick and you will be able to copy all your important data easily.

Kindest regards,

Marcel - www.ictdesk.net

Well, for non Linux users this can be difficult. For booting from LAN, you need:
1. Another working computer.
2. DHCP server application on it.
3. TFTP server application on it.
4. FTP server or something for transfering files from damaged disk. (or pendrive if it will work)
4. Files of operating system which can be booted from LAN.

It is very simple on Linux, it has every application you need for this, more info at:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Installation/Netboot
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/478

There are many methods of recovering data, for you I recommend downloading Live CD of Ubuntu and extract files to TFTP server. It needs some configuration to work (you must edit /pxelinux.cfg/default) but then it's easier with graphical interface.

If not, from install screen of netboot version, at damaged computer (if you successfully boot it from LAN), you can run second console (ALT+F2) and do for example:

mkdir /mnt/disk_c
mkdir /mnt/disk_d
mkdir /mnt/disk_e
mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sda1 /mnt/disk_c
mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sda2 /mnt/disk_d
mount -t ntfs -o ro /dev/sda3 /mnt/disk_e

and so on... depending on how many partitions you have. For coping files:

mkdir /mnt/pendrive
mount -t vfat /dev/sdb /mnt/pendrive
cp /mnt/disk_c/* /mnt/pendrive

You can list directory by command "ls", and change it by "cd".



Maybe you have free space on working computer, so you can consider installation of some Linux for example Ubuntu. Be careful do not format your Windows files, it is often mistake during installation. It will be simpler then.

To everyone who has read / posted in this thread: it is impossible to get direct access to a hard drive by simply booting it's host computer over the network. The wake on lan functionality is purely for TURNING ON the remote pc. To access the files on the remote computer, it would have to be able to boot properly and run an FTP server.

The only solutions are to:
a) Boot the computer from another storage device (using a live CD or usb),
i) if your CD/DVD drive is broken, and you can't boot your computer from USB, you're going to have to spend some money to replace the CD/DVD drive;
OR
b) use a hard drive enclosure.

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey