cgsecurity.org

Hello everyone,

My sister gave me her Dell Hybrid mini-computer to see if I could extract photos off the dead hdd. The computer will not boot into Windows and the primary disk is not recognized in the BIOS. I tried loading a small Linux program into the computer's memory, which worked fine for me. However, the Linux program would not recognize her hard drive or any files on it.

My question to you guys is can I use a thumb drive with "File Recovery" on it to see if I can retrieve her photos? I noticed that there is a DOS version, but I am not sure if this is how the program is used. The BIOS will recognize a USB as a boot device. If you need more information, please let me know. I cannot get past the hdd failure message during the boot. The cdrom drive on this little machine is also inoperable.

Thank you for your patience with me.

Jennifer

You could try removing the HDD. This video shows you how to open the machine.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lT4nUXI9GB4

Then you can connect the HDD to another PC through an adapter.
Might be something like this:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/StarTech-SuperS ... omputers_2

To make a bootable USB, you can try the information on this sites:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_cr ... e_Live_USB

http://www.linuxliveusb.com/

As for the Linux distribution you will have to make your own research and choose.

This is a suggestion:

http://spins.fedoraproject.org/security/#downloads

Another candidate could be:

http://www.backtrack-linux.org/

This disribution is based in Ubuntu and it can run in forensics mode and also it does carry many of the tools
mentioned here:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery

Best of luck

Thank you very much for the links and your reply.
Jennifer