Dear all,

I'm booting UBCD from the CD (on my VAIO laptop that has a sick HDD with Vista on it). Everything looks good, I can even see the files from the sick HDD, but since I'd like to salvage some of them to a USB stick, I'm trying to enable USB support with no luck. No matter which of the 3 options (/e, /u, etc.) I try, all of them cause the USB support to get stuck while saying "Initializing host controller X/N", where X and N vary according to the USB type (with N=2, 5, or 7).

Anyone else had luck?

In case I'm screwed, I've got an alternative question: anyone has a suggestion on how to salvage my files? Could I be able to transfer them via network to a Windows XP box on the same LAN? Note that I can't boot the Vista recovery console as disk.sys gets stuck trying to talk to the sick HDD.

Thanks so much in advance, and keep up the good work, this CD saved my life!

Are you booting to Parted Magic or Freedos? If not, what exactly are you booting to? If you boot to Parted Magic you should be able to access the files and copy to a USB drive. If you are having problems getting the USB to be accessible you can try other Linux distros such as Puppy or Damn Small Linux or others that can do the same things and some also include CD/DVD burning programs that could help..

Piney,

Thanks so much for your answer - I was stubbornly booting to FreeDos. After reading your reply, I booted to Parted Magic and - poof! All problems solved! Parted Magic sees all my USB drives just fine and I've been salvaging my data since Sunday!!!! Thanks SO much again!!!!!

P.S.: for anyone else who's interested, I figured out that FreeDos on UBCD version 5 _can_ see USB sticks as well; however, it can't see USB backup drives such as Seagate (as a matter of fact it *does* see the device but it can't mount it as a drive).

I ran into that problem few days ago...pissed me off. Glad your problem has been solved. Good luck with the back up.

_________________
~Just StopSpazzing~

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