Need help installing a second OS

[horrorific]

I have a gateway laptop and recently it got the blue screen of death and is now stuck in a 'recovery' cycle. Unfortunately the recovery will format the HD and I will loose all my data. So my goal right now is to either; split the HD or figure out how to boot from a 2GB USB flash drive.

So far every attempt I've made, by following tutorials, has failed miserably in making a bootable flash drive. So my last resort is to split the drive and hopefully backup my data onto an external drive. After backing up my files I'll format the whole damn thing and reinstall windows...which I apparently can do with my eyes closed, now.

 

[dwellman]

No no no.

You have two (very simple) options:
1) Yank the drive and mont in either a) an enclosure or b) a desktop (using a 3.5 to 2.5 drive adapter for ATA. connect CAREFULLY)*.

2) Use a Live CD to boot the macihne and coneect an external drive to dump your data.

EDIT: I keep forgetting SATA connectors are the same for 2.5 and 3.5 drives. I'm sooooo old school.

 

[horrorific]

Ok, since I'm not too friendly with the idea of taking apart my laptop. I'll go with option #2, with that comes a new questions though >_<

Whats a live CD (how do I get/make one)?

 

[dwellman]

A live CD is an OS that boots from an runs completely from a CD or DVD (basically like ROM). Here's a list:
http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

SLAX seems to be the most popular. Knoppix is good, too. Either works. A Bart PE is very good too,

 

[horrorific]

Ok, I've managed to make a few live CDs from UBCD, so far only one has been successful in working. But the problem is that now although it does boot it stops at a blank blue screen with a (working) pointer.

Some of the tools I installed game me errors like; "missing media, check cable" or "no hard drive detected".

I'm not quite sure of how I should go about doing this. The OS that crashed was vista home premium (x32), but the laptop didn't come with it, I bought my laptop and got the "express upgrade" that came later. So, lacking in a official vista OS I'm trying to use winXP pro (sp2), could that be the problem?

edit: I tried using xp pro because I've never really tried an open source OS before, but now it seems I'll have to experiment. I'm downloading slax right now, hopefully I'll finish the CD and make an attempt to boot sometime tonight.

 

[horrorific]

Lol, slax worked beautifully. I managed to get the majority of the files I wanted to recover.

But now I've got a new problem. The automatic recovery, which is supposed to format the drive and install the default windows components is now getting the blue screen. I think at this point I'm just going to format the drive and reinstall windows manually.


Thanks for all your help, dwellman

edit: one last question, since my normal method doesn't seem to be working, is there a way to format in slax? Or get into DOS? I have a DOS boot floppy but my laptop doesn't have a floppy drive >_<

 

[BeakerUK]

If you have the XP CD and are having issues getting the drivers in then use nlite. Google is your friend here, it'll even tell you the correct settings off the nlite website.

 

[horrorific]

What do you mean? I'm not try to get drivers for anything, I just need to format the HD. My hope is that it'll allow me to reinstall windows afterward.

And like I said before, this is windows vista, I installed it with an express upgrade. And before that the OS was xp home media center 05

 

[dwellman]

Have you tried the procedure outlined here:
http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/winvista_upgrade_clean.asp ?

 

[horrorific]

edit: Ok, I just tried the process a second time and so far so good. I've installed windows and all thats left is the user setup.

Thank you, again