windows crashed! help me recover my data

so my old laptop crashed the other day and I have some data on the hard drive that I'd like to retrieve.

The thing I'm worried about is there was only about 900mb of free space on the 30gb drive. Now when I boot with a windows cd sometimes it'll show me that and now it's showing the hard drive is completely empty.

This same thing happened a couple of days ago when I tried it so I left it alone. Today I tried it again and it showed my ~29gb used data on the hard drive so I thought I'd try to partition it with gparted so I can maybe install windows 2000 on it or something. I booted into gparted and it showed the drive as -- under used space. I restarted with the windows xp cd and it showed a completely empty hard drive again and thats where I am now.

If I try to continue to install windows on my "empty hard drive" it'll tell me it can't. I also recall gparted mentioning something about NTFS and bad clusters or something along those lines.

So is my data lost even if I bought an external enclosure for it to try to get the data off of it? If anybody could help me out that'd be great. Thanks

 

Did you try using any of the Safe Mode Boot Options? Hold F8 during startup. Try Directory Service Restore Mode. Any luck?

If you can boot into XP you can attempt to repair the broken clusters with XP's Disk Error Checking.

Also try to free up more hard disk space with Disk Cleanup and Delete large files and Uninstall Programs you no longer need.

Hopefully you can recover your files and create a backup. Then you could perform a Repair Installation or even a Clean Install of XP, but that could be overkill.

 

Can't get into safe mode either. It'll give me the options but flash a blue screen really quickly before restarting. Same thing on a regular boot.

I've looked through some sites and many recommend booting off a xp cd, choosing to install xp and choose to repair the windows installation but I don't even get that option.

Any other suggestions? Thanks

 

Can't get into safe mode either. It'll give me the options but flash a blue screen really quickly before restarting. Same thing on a regular boot.

I've looked through some sites and many recommend booting off a xp cd, choosing to install xp and choose to repair the windows installation but I don't even get that option.

Any other suggestions? Thanks

 

now it reads the drive again. I couldn't do a repair because I was using the wrong cd. I pop in the windows xp home cd and chose to repair and this is the message I got:

setup has determined that drive c: is corrupted and cannot be repaired

so is my data safe if I hook it up to an external? Will I be able to access the files or will it not read or open because it's corrupted? Thanks

 

Yes, nothing will happen to your data if you use an enclosure to connect it externally to another PC. If it is not an actual hardware failure (like a head crash or a controller error) then you should be able to recover most of the data with little effort. Actually, connecting it externally is safer than trying to repair it in your notebook. Be very careful when using those partitioning tools, because one wrong move can wipe out all your data for good.