How it worked for me

Congratulations on an innovative solution...

Personnally I'd have booted to a live cd (Knoppix/Auditor/DSL), mounted the HD and retrieved the required files to a USB drive, or if the laptop had cd-rw drive I'd burn them to CD.

Then with the files safely backed up I'd educate the customer in the ways of a non microsoft world, provided them with a liveCD and only then re-installed XP if required.

Perhaps a short lesson in backup etc might have been good as well,

R

I would have taken his hard drive out, stuck it into a working machine as a slave and copied the files straight off

I would have taken his hard drive out, stuck it into a working machine as a slave and copied the files straight off

Yup, i would agree if we were talking about a desktop machine, thats a little more difficult when we are talking about a Laptop, hehe

I would have gone along with Ranger & jhun on this one. The key thing here for me is that fact that the data is of ultra importance. I would attempt to retrive that data off the laptop WITHOUT making any modification to the laptop incase something catastrophic happened in the process. Once the data was safely on some other media, i would then be happy to try other techniques to get the laptop booting into Windows. To be honest I would probably wipe it clean to ensure a clean install of the Operating System and nothing is left behind and re-install. I would also partition the drive to ensure that all data is stored on a seperate partition (EXTENDED PARTITION) to ensure that if there are issues again, the data is preserved no matter what you do to the SYSTEM partition.

Then comes the next bit, i would educate the user to start maintaining backups of their data onto USB drives or something else, maybe before giving it back i would appologies for not being able to retreive the data to shock them into realising how important it is to keep copies of stuff.

Then comes the next bit, i would educate the user to start maintaining backups of their data onto USB drives or something else, maybe before giving it back i would appologies for not being able to retreive the data to shock them into realising how important it is to keep copies of stuff.

Evil, but fun

u guyz are all crazy......lol

rockape u said -

Then comes the next bit, i would educate the user to start maintaining backups of their data onto USB drives or something else, maybe before giving it back i would appologies for not being able to retreive the data to shock them into realising how important it is to keep copies of stuff.

Evil, but fun

Rockape i tell u that if u were faced in such a situation especially when u noticed that the person was almost peeing (urinating) in his pants..... just imagine such situation. u faced with life and death.

u guyz have great ideas and to smurf hummmm the guru of all times.... love ur reasoning...

Yup, i would agree if we were talking about a desktop machine, thats a little more difficult when we are talking about a Laptop

the bishop it seems u handle more of desktop than laptop man laptop handling is meant for brains.... aight..


still waiiting for more contributions....

thanks and cheers......

This customer is a web designer that codes PHP? They should have known better, shame on them.