As we all know, nothing is perfect and there will be a time when your computer crashes on you and if you are unfortunate enough, it might not start back up again. When this happens, you risk the possibility of not getting your important personal documents and photos back. Fortunately, when your computer crashes, it usually doesn’t affect your personal files on the hard drive itself.
Watch Video: Boot to a Linux CD or Flash Drive to Recover Your Files From Your Windows PC.
If the Windows recovery options do not help and you need to do something like reinstall Windows to get your computer up and running again, this might involve having the hard drive wiped before Windows gets installed. And if you don’t have a current backup, then you will definitely be losing your files.
If you are the tech savvy type, you can boot to a Live Linux CD or flash drive to recover your files from your Windows PC. When you run a live version of the Linux operating system on your computer, it runs temporarily in your computer’s RAM and does not need to be installed on the hard drive. Then when you shut down the computer, everything you have done in the Linux OS is lost and no changes are made to your computer.
Once you have Linux running in memory on your PC, you can then attach a flash drive or external drive and use the Linux operating system to copy your files to that drive. Then once you have your files backed up on this drive, you can go about reinstalling Windows or doing whatever steps are necessary to repair your computer without worrying about losing your data.
Booting Your Computer to a Live Linux Flash Drive or CD
The first thing you will need to do is download a copy of Linux that you can then burn to a CD or flash drive. Just make sure it’s a version that allows you to run it in memory because you do not want to install it on your computer. You use Linux versions such as Ubuntu or Knoppix to accomplish this. We will be using Ubuntu Desktop for our demonstration.
Once you download the ISO file, you can then burn it to a CD or use a program such as Rufus to create a bootable USB flash drive that you can run Linux from.
You will need to know how to change the boot order of your PC if it does not recognize the CD in your drive or the USB flash drive, so it boots from that rather than your hard drive.
Once your computer boots from the CD or flash drive, you will choose the option that says Try or Install Ubuntu.
The next screen is very important because you need to make sure to choose the Try Ubuntu option rather than the Install Ubuntu choice.
Once you click on Try Ubuntu, it will load the Linux desktop on your computer, and you can start using Linux at this time. Now you can attach your flash drive or external hard drive and should get a notification at the top of the screen that you can click on to open the drive.
If not, then look for a USB drive icon at the left of the screen and you should be able to access your USB drive and see any files that might be on it.
Now you will need to look for another type of hard drive icon on the left to open the hard drive inside of your computer that contains Windows and your personal files. If you have more than one hard drive inside your computer, you should see that here as well.
Once you open the hard drive in your computer, you will then need to browse to the location of the files that you want to backup to your USB drive. If you are looking for your documents, photos and desktop etc., they should be under the Users folder and then your username. If you are using OneDrive, then you may have a OneDrive folder after your username.
Now you can simply highlight the files you want to copy and drag and drop them to the USB drive or right click on them and choose Copy to.
Then you can choose your USB drive from the list on the left hand side of the next window that appears.
Once you have your files copied to your USB drive, you may want to connect it to another computer and make sure everything copied over correctly before trying to reinstall Windows on your PC.
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