Megans Laptop Recovery

Monday evening Megan reports blue screen of death.  (of her computer)
It is real hot so I figured that there was a problem with the cooling so I turn it off and let it cool.  Some hours later when it is nice and cold, switch on and the booting process freezez on a black screen with a line of text of some kind advising of a failure.  Ohhhh Sh........ me thinks  (quietly ofcourse) (knowing full well that like everyone else that there is no recent backup).

But it could be the computer.  Luckilly Chris has an identical laptop (which incidentilly I repaired on the weekend) so the drives are swapped.  Unfortunately the problem followed the drive.

8:30pm - Nip down to office works and buy a 500GB External USB drive $69.00.
These days the manufacturers do their best to make it difficult to get into them but finally with some assistance from Mr google and a sharp flat blade screw drive we have the drive apart.
The USB adapter board was disconnected and the drive fitted to the laptop.
Using the information from the previous post regarding booting from USB, the laptop is booted and Ghost run.  Quite fortutiously I had created a Ghost image of the machine when I last rebuilt it in 2009.  This image was convieniently stored on a external USB hard disk.  On it went and up it came.
Another good decision was to route all Megans email through gmail with an IMAP connection.  This meant that after a good delay (like all night) her email just re appeared as Mr google had convieniently kept it all for her.

In the mean time, the crashed hard disk was connected to my laptop with the USB adapter board retrieved from the new drive.  I connected it a couple of times and sometimes the drive was seen by Windows but when I tried to access it, everything would freeze up.  Searched the net for free hard disk recovery programs with no success.  Tried
convair
Easus
PCinspector smart recovery
Disk Investigator.

I resorted to trying paid progranms that would provide some limited functionality in demo mode.
The only program that would see anything was
Recover Data for FAT & NTFS from
http://www.recoverdatatools.com
With considerable moral agony I forked out my $69 US (whats with the $69 number?) and purchased the program.

Interestingly I found that I could only get anything to happen if I held the drive vertically and then plugged it into the USB.  Then wait for it to spin up and then turn it upside down.

The recovery tool spent an hour scanning and wot not.  Then after clicking boxes etc started to copy the files.  I went to bed.
Got up this morning only to be greeted with the blue screen of death again!.
Re booted.
Had a look some but not all files copied.
Then noticed that windows could see the drive so manually started to copy directories one at a time.
Ahh what a relief.
went to work.

should add a photo of all pile of devistation and
should get a decent automatic back up system going like we have at work.

Not all drives are created equal.  This is a Western Digital "Elements" disk that contains the life saving ghost image.  Note that the drive has the USB built in.  No adapter board.