Win7 laptop help, please

[lazarus]

my daughter has an 18 month old Toshiba laptop with Win7 installed. A few minutes ago, she tried opening Skype, and it locked up her system. The only thing she could think to do is power it down and then power it back up.

Now, we get the initial splash screen, giving us the option to hit F12 for boot, that sort of thing, then a cursor (old school, just an underline) appears in the upper left corner. That's it. At one point, it gave her the option to go into Windows Safe Mode, and that just gave her a black screen with a working mouse cursor.

I vaguely remember you folks talking about using an Ubuntu live disc to do recoveries, but have no clue how to proceed with that. She's got lots of un-backed up media files that she'd prefer not to lose, so I'd like to avoid a clean boot.

Any help is appreciated.

[pokerfan]

1. get a Ubuntu live CD

Obviously, you will have to use another computer. Go to ubuntu.com.

1. Follow the directions to download and burn the disk image.
2. Boot from the CD - this may or may not require changing your BIOS settings.
3. When prompted, select "run from CD" rather than "install system."

It will be slow because it's running from your optical drive and not you hard drive but be patient. Eventually the Ubuntu (Gnome) desktop will show up and you will be able to explore the computer from there. If you aren't comfortable with the command line, go to Alt-F1 ==> Places ==> Computer which brings up the Nautilus file manager. Start nosing around. When you find files you want to save the file manager will also handle external drives.

[struggle4progress]

2. People sometimes have trouble with ubuntu on toshiba machines

I gave an ubuntu liveCD to a friend with a toshiba last year, but he could never get it to boot into ubuntu

[pokerfan]

4. That's a good point

The OP might have to try some other flavors.

There's also systemrescuecd: http://www.sysresccd.org/Main_Page

which is still Linux, just not a complete distro and includes some recovery tools that a distro might not include on the LiveCD.

[canetoad]

3. I have a year old Toshiba laptop

And it will boot from Mint Linux on a flash drive. Maybe that is your solution.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/linux-mint-6-flash-drive-install-via-cd/

[lpbk2713]

5. Thanks for the useful link Canetoad.

I might try that myself.

Kudos to Canetoad. He always provides excellent info.


:thumbsup: :thumbsup: