My computer crashed about a week ago. My husband was installing a router and I tripped over the power cord during the middle of it. We had a friend over that is a computer tech and he said we have what is known as the blue screen of death. Oh course, being a idiot I have not backed up anything. All the pictures I have taken over the last 3 years are on that hard drive. Including all the pictures of my newborn daughter
We got this disk and are trying to figure out how to retrieve photos and documents off the hard drive. Can anyone tell me step by step how to do this in simple terms that I might be able to understand? Can the ultimate
boot Cd help me retreive data like this? Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated! Thank you

It can help although a maybe easier option (and i hate to keep bringing this up but it fits perfectly for a novice) is the UBCD4Win disk. If you have another machine and your XP install disk, you can create it to give you a graphic interface instead of a DOS based interface.

Either way...

Your photos and other info in My Docs and on your desktop are all going to be located in:

c:\Documents and Settings\%userprofile%\My Documents or Desktop

That is where your my docs and my pics and such are all located. Then from there you can copy t to another machine or burn it to disk or what have you. As long as the disk is ok and it is just Winders that is messed up, then you save the data off of the machine.

Another thing that can be tried instead of the disk is to try booting into safe mode. After you turn the machine on and you see the BIOS startup screen and prior to the Windows startup screens, press continuley F8 to get the Windows boot options. If you did it right, you will be presented with a list about 10 items long saying safemode or safemode with networking and last known good and such. Select last known good first. Try that and if it does not work then try doing Safe Mode w/Networking. Then Safe Mode by itself. If the system can be booted up in those modes, then backup can be done easier. Other wise you will have to do what i mentioned earlier.

Thanks for the info. Unfortunatly, our computer came with bundled software, we never had any of the original software. Is there anyother way to do this other than using this disk you mentioned?

The only other thing would be to try the safemode and last known good configuration settings... Those are about it... You may be able to use this disk to make an image of your harddrive but I have not used the included tools to do this. Whenever I needed to image a drive using this disk, I added my companys ghost boot disks to the CD and used those.

I apologize that other than the boot options for XP, I am unable to assist you further... I wish you luck with your repair! Lets us know the outcome.