Dear all,

I am a novice at trying to backing up my files and data before my hard drive crashes but guess what, I am here to say that my hard drive has crashed and I cannot do that now. I get an error message : <Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe

which means I have to either reinstall my Windows XP (which I hope works and I still have to find) or reformat my computer.

My question is: how can I save the files on my hard drive manually since my computer technically won't get past this error message?

Please let me know asap.

Sincerely,

coomstop

Read How to recover your folders/files when Windows won’t boot

Hi coomstop,

I've had many such troubles before due to the way i use my computer

I normally just try booting off the xp cd and using the Repair option and not the New Installation option.

This just fixes most things. If this doesn't work however, you will have to go our and buy a USB case for your HDD and try read it via usb on another computer. If you can read it, you can copy your files on another drive or DVD.

Then you can just reinstall windows using the New Install option and when the system asks where to install your Windows files, you can delete all partitions until there is only one option saying something like "Unaloscated space 0 250GB" or similar.

Then just install your files there.

Hope this helps. And please do let me know how you get on.

Cheers.

There are a few ways you can go about getting the needed files.

1. If you have a second computer install the hard disk into the second computer and grab the files off of it.
2. You can install windows XP without reformatting and get your needed files, burn them to a CD and than reformat and reinstall you O/S of choice.
3. You can buy and external hard drive USB adapter and place the hard disk into the adapter, from there take the HD to a friends computer to retrieve the needed data etc...

These are just a few options I have used my self and they have always been reliable.