Hard Drive File Recovery

Hi i need to reformat my girlfriends computer and she wants some files off the hard drive .. but the only thing i can get it to boot in is safe mode is there any way other than physicaly taking the hard drive out and hooking it up to another computer to get the files off ... can i boot in safe mode and network to it or something to access it?? thanks for the help

Mike

 

there is an option to startup in safe mode with networking support.

 

Okay will that let me hook up to the hard drive if i connect an eithernet cable to the bad computer and like my laptop? I just want to try and avoid actually taking out the hard drive because its a pain, I already did once because i thought it was bad but it looked okay and I was able to get to the files when i hooked it up to my desktop and didn't boot from it just accesed the files on it. I didn't think to copy over the my docs folder to my computer just in case. I did notice the safe mode with networking but i haven't used safe mode enough to know what that acutally means or what you can acutally hook up to with it.

 

it' gonna be a pain if you don't have networking already set up on the computer. You need a special ethernet cable called a crossover cable, and need to set up filesharing among many things. The easiest thing to do is to take the hard drive out and put it in an external USB hard drive enclosure Like this one from newegg.com.

 

Whats that thing actually do .. just make it so you can easily hook it up to another computer ? its cheap enough plus someday i want to get my A+ certification so it might be a handy tool to have.

 

the enclosure basically turns an internal hard drive internal an external USB hard drive. You simply put the hard drive from your girlfriend's comp into this case and then you can connect it to your laptop with a USB cable. Sorry for my answers being brief, I'm in the middle of a computer class and replying while the teacher is lecturing.

 

Thats okay im at work also .. lol i understand the class thing though im in school too....actually for computers .. thanks for the info on that device though it sounds like a good thing to have ill have to pick one up.

 

you buy one at a local computer store. I just used newegg as a quick example of product.