My niece's Windows XP Dell just died. It won't boot. She keeps getting a "Loading PBR for discriptor 2... done. Disk read error occurred. ctrl+alt+delete to restart".

So, I want to the necessary tools with me to be able to rescue her many, many pictures and iTunes by saving them onto an external USB hard drive. Also, I want to be able to reformat her hard drive and set her up with separate swap, Windows and probably a FAT32 data partition for her pictures, music and documents so that I can always get to it with a Linux CD or whatever. She won't back anything up, so it is up to me to be able to save her from time to time.

Please give your laundry list of indispensible tools and, if you would, a brief description of what it does and why it is good. I have had experience with a Gparted LiveCD and, RIP or the Ultimate Boot CD in the past. Those were good, if I recall.

Thanks,

B.

Slax is a good one with KDE if you want a GUI also includes Midnight Commander (mc), and will auto mount yourUSB harddrive if you have it plugged in before booting, use cfdisk while in slax to get the harddrive ready for a Linux install...

R.I.P is good, gparted is good too...

Knoppix 5.1.1 live CD should work. All you want to do is put the usb hard drive in the USB slot, start the machine, mount the hard disc and usb disc, and transfer stuff from the hard drive to the usb harddisk before wiping and reinstalling Windows and maybe giving her a dual boot linux option, right?

Use the Windows installer to set up the internal hard disc once you've reformatted (it will want to do it anyway) and install windows after you've saved her from herself.

http://www.freesbie.org/
http://www.knoppix.net/
http://www.efense.com/helix/
http://www.slax.org/
http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
http://www.webtree.ca/windowsxp/repair_xp.htm
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=win...=UTF-8&fr=moz2
http://www.neuber.com/taskmanager/process/
http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=oph...=UTF-8&fr=moz2

Well, you'd better be paying attention to that "disk read error" and considering the high probability that there is a failure here that goes beyond what you are going to do with a live CD.

In the situation you describe, I would be showing up with my copy of spinrite (as well as a knoppix 5.1 DVD) hoping that the drive would spin up so I could attempt recovery. I also would have with me some means to make another hard drive available to the system under test. This might be an ethernet crossover cable (or a router), and another computer with enough hard drive space to extract her entire hard drive as an image, or it might be just an IDE or SATA or SCSI cable so I could plug another drive into the system next to the one that is failing.

If it would spin up, and if spinrite saved it (very good chance), then I would proceed as indicated. If the drive was actively failing, I would set up my mechanism to transfer the contents of the HD as an image. and I would use dd to image the hard drive.

If spinrite showed me damage from, for example, a head crash that damaged the media but the R/W heads were still working, then I would just run chkdsk and recover whatever needed recovering on the damaged HD before turning it back over to her.

That is what I would do. You do whatever you think will work.

Also, I would NEVER set up a FAT partition. That file system is totally obsolete and no longer needed for any reason. You can mount for read/write ext2/3 partitions from Windows, and you can mount for read/write ntfs partitions from Linux. No one needs FAT and it should be left to die the death it should have died long ago.

Your niece is much more likely to lose data due to corruption on a FAT partition than from the far more advanced and far more robust NTFS system.