I'm doing it again - replying to my own emails.

Problem solved - I eventually discovered how to remove the laptop's drive.  After that it was a simple job to slave it into a desktop system and copy the files I needed.

Ian Porter
Computer Guys Inc.
Arrowtown
New Zealand
[log in to unmask]

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Ian 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Tuesday, September 02, 2003 1:35 PM
  Subject: [PCSOFT] Laptop file retrieval problem


  Folks, I've got a curly one.  A 3-month old Acer 234XC laptop has XPHome.  

  The OS is damaged and needs to be recovered, but only a full recovery is possible, not a repair, which means all files will be lost.

  The customer would like to have some important jpg's retrieved.

  Using the Acer boot disk, I can enter the system in DOS and see the files I want to retrieve.  (The system must be FAT32, otherwise I don't see how this would be possible)

  The CDRW drive works insofar as I can read the contents of CD's .  There is a floppy drive also.  There is a network port, 2 USB ports and a printer port.

  Here's the curly bit:  All the 20 or so jpg's I want to retrieve are over 1.4Mb so I can't copy them to floppy.  All of them are over 2mb's.

  I considered pulling out the HDD and slaving it to another system, but I'm durned if I can see how to remove it, short of gutting the machine completely, so that's out.

  If anyone can think of another way I can do this retrieval job, I'd much appreciate it.

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