Getting Data Off A Nearly Hosed Hard Drive

Nearly Hosed? Is that like Nearly Dead?

In the case of the hard drive in my HP, it means that the drive is not recognizing and launching .exe file extensions. You know, execute? The one you need to make programs RUN?!

Anyway, the old laptop has a maxed out 60 gig hard drive. How to get the stuff I need off of it presents a challenge. There are a lot of pictures. At first glance, it looked like 20 gig. Further exploration and removal of duplicate and blurry pictures (far more of the former than the latter) took off about 3 gig from that total. I got the static images down to 4.18 gigs-perfect for fitting on a DVD.

How to get them on one was the question. Thanks to my wonderful husband's guidance and expertise, we installed Nero on the kid's PC. Next, I created a folder on the HP called Backup pictures. Note: if your hard drive is close to maximum capacity, make sure you've put it somewhere other than MY desktop, MY pictures or MY documents. Otherwise, when you do go to move it, the computer will attempt to make temp files as it moves them and you won't have room.

Why network instead of using the burner in the HP? It only has a CD burner, which means 700mb discs. I'd rather use 1 DVD disc and the network instead of 6 discs if I launched it from my machine.

Thankfully, Ed's not using the internet right now-this task is really pounding our bandwidth.

If I only had a few things to transfer, the easy route is to email them to myself as attachments. It doesn't work with 60 gigs, because gmail caps at 20 megs.

Oh, and I think I figured out the iPod with double data on it. I probably have to plug it back into the HP to remove the 10 gig data file and then deselect the machine. Apple's instructions on their website aren't exactly clear whether you hook the iPod back to the source computer or the receiving computer to dump the data file.

Someday, I'll get all of this off here, so we can clip the hard drive on the HP...

Comments

Anonymous said…
I wish there was a better way to handle all that stuff. I have files I need to copy from my laptop to my desktop then over to the external drive where I back everything up.

Good luck!

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