Vista home premium recovery

So I've hit a dead end. I've recently had my vista completely crash and die on me. Instead of reinstalling and wiping, I'd like to recover some of the files before I do so. I tried reworking the boot sequence in BIOS, still recognizes the hdd so I assume thats still in working condition.
I popped in my vista disk and ran the repair to no avail so I decided to use the repair disk to get into dos and do some things myself.

I ran chkdsk and that got me to the "Windows was not shut down properly... etc." But it really doesn't matter because no matter which option I choose (Safe mode, safe+networking, blah blah) I end up with my mouse cursor over a blank black screen for an indefinite amount of time.

So I went back into dos and fixed the master boot record, ran chkdsk again, and somewhere in this mess of troubleshooting I received a message saying my master file table is corrupted, not sure of the exact words anymore. So I assume a virus or bug has completely wrecked my vista to the core of its being, but I need those files pretty badly. they are just pictures but they mean a lot to me.

I still haven't tried to pop the hdd into another computer and xfer files yet, waiting on a professional opinion before I risk piggybacking this into my other OS.

And all of this started when I couldn't boot period, was getting the error saying cannot read disk... press ctl alt del to restart

Vista Home Premium 32-bit

 

Is the drive formatted NTFS? I will guess it likely is.

Are your pictures/other files located in your USER files, as in, under Pictures, Documents, etc. of your logon account (if so, they are encrypted for that user account, and won't be recoverable unless you are able to login to the account)?

You can always try connecting the drive to another computer, OR you can try using a live distro of Linux to attempt to browse the hard drive and recover the files you need (Ubuntu live CD, etc.).

Again, though, if the say, pictures, are in say, My Pictures, Windows encrypts data associated with the user account (anything in Documents, Pictures, Videos, etc. of THAT particular account), so file recovery without using that particular login will most likely result in failure. I can't be positive this is automatic in Vista, it was optional in XP. A try can't hurt, though.

The other option you have, is to install Vista on another computer, create another account using the same account name and password, and connect the drive to that... I believe that should allow it to decrypt the data if in fact it was stored in your user folders.

If you do connect the drive to another computer, you may need to go into folder/file Properties, Security tab, and take ownership (Advanced settings) of the folders/files to be recovered in order to gain access to them.

 

Thanks for the advice, I'll get my hands dirty and pop the hdd into another comp.
Yes the drive is NTFS, now I know this may sound like a dumb question, but is it possible to load an OS onto a portable drive and just plug it in and set it to the priority boot in bios?
Just pulling at straws here, thanks.

 

Huzzah, for anybody who has the same problem or was curious for the solution that worked for me...

I reinstalled windows vista using my Vista Home Premium disk and as long as you dont reformat the drive or repartition anything, when you confirm the install, a dialog box pops up saying all your old pictures and files will be kept in a windows.old file.

So basically, I now have a reinstalled OS while keeping all my old photos I was worried about losing, yay! Tim, thanks for the link, it led to my lightbulb moment, mcsmc, thanks for the tips.