RuneEdge
Silent Assassin
- 1 October 2003
- Manchester United
A few days ago, my PC stopped booting XP for some reason. Something to do with system32/hal.dll missing or whatever. I used my sisters laptop to see if theres a fix for it. I found about 7 different "working" methods that I could try but none of them worked, including reinstalling windows, installing another windows on a spare HDD and using the main one as a slave, fiddling with the boot.ini, etc.
The only thing I knew would work for me for sure was to back everything up and reformatting the PC. I've already been through this about 3 times in the past and there was nearly 300gb of data to backup and around 30 DVD-Rs wasted. There was no way I was gonna go do that again.
So this morning I bought a nice new laptop to replace my PC. The plan is to have this laptop as my main computer and the desktop as a backup or spare. I took the HDDs out of my PC, put them into a external harddrive enclosure and transferred all my files onto the laptop.
My question, what else can I salvage from the HDD? and how?
I'm talking about things like bookmarks from Firefox and IE, or device drivers that came with the PC (which I'll need when I reformat the thing cuz I don't have a CD for them), etc.
Files copy over easily but its all the settings and configurations that I need. Can anyone help?
The only thing I knew would work for me for sure was to back everything up and reformatting the PC. I've already been through this about 3 times in the past and there was nearly 300gb of data to backup and around 30 DVD-Rs wasted. There was no way I was gonna go do that again.
So this morning I bought a nice new laptop to replace my PC. The plan is to have this laptop as my main computer and the desktop as a backup or spare. I took the HDDs out of my PC, put them into a external harddrive enclosure and transferred all my files onto the laptop.
My question, what else can I salvage from the HDD? and how?
I'm talking about things like bookmarks from Firefox and IE, or device drivers that came with the PC (which I'll need when I reformat the thing cuz I don't have a CD for them), etc.
Files copy over easily but its all the settings and configurations that I need. Can anyone help?