done the unthinkable!

[Richp]

Hi there
Short of weeping i dont know what else to do , thought i may find advice here.

To cut a long story short, in part of my business we sell a magnetic device, rather stupidly after speaking
to a customer today i put the device in my front jeans pocket, not long after i sat down with my laptop on
my knee... yeah i know how much of an idiot am i? to work, the laptop froze and upon trying to restart i
just got a black screen.
I have now made the laptop start up but after the Viao start up screen i get another screen which says
' windows cannot start because the file c:/windows/system32/hal.dll is missing or currupt, please reinstal
this file'.
Im currently away from home, but have recovery disks at home, hopefully they will help me salvage something
from this disaster.
However should they not work, i need to know if there is anything which can be done to try and get the laptop
working and my documents etc back, incidentally the laptop is about 15 months old and only last week did i start a
back up for the first time. Which i havent anywhere like finished.
Incidentally i own a viao S5M and the magnet touched the underside of the laptop on the right hand side about a
third of the way up from the bottom. Im guessing knowing my luck this is where my hard drive is.
any help for this idiot here appreciated
Rich

[Thalamus.]

Tomorrow im going to go get an external drive and try the recovery ... i have read about the recovery and it says my documents should have been on my 😧 i fear they are all on my C: ... is it obvious  where this dual pane screen is when i do the restoere ? 

Hi Rich,

Unfortunately I don't think your S5 has an option to run the Rescue Data utility, that Tony Beard mentioned, within the Vaio Recovery Utility options as I'm sure this is only available on the Pre-installed Vista models..

[Richp]

yeah thalmus i think your right pal.

Basically im still trying to get this ERD commander softwarer, found it on a few torrent site but they all appear to be viruses....
I did try some software called knoppix tho, however its all in German as i cant find an english version, when i loaded it i could see my files, and view them, however was unable to copy them and couldnt understand what the programme was telling me ... hense the german lol

However now when i re run this programme it says something about NTFS on the drive and that i should run chkdsk /F however i booted windows and rean chkdsk/f but its not an option i canonlt run /r / p, i tried both but it dosent get above 0%, so that dosent appear to work either..... does anyone think i could caddy this drive in a usb caddy and get the files this way ?

oh and kee lo year your right mate, that software would need to be on a bootable CD, dont think the knoppix environment would run it.

[Thalamus.]

I did try some software called knoppix tho, however its all in German as i cant find an english version

Have a look here for Knoppix information..

Download version 5.1 for free from here make sure you select the English version..

[kee-lo_]

I've rescued a USB key with Koppix

[Richp]

could this spinrite software mentioned before run in the knoppix system ? ? ?

i have now managed to do a chkdsk, it got to 50% then gavbe up .... now back in knoppix but its not even seeing my hard drive now, least i have the english version lol

[Thalamus.]

Continued on regarding my previous post - Done the unthinkable thread..