Solved Cannot Boot From Recovery CD

[newenglandmom2]

Message finally said "E:\ is not accessible. The request could not be performed because of an I/O device error."

I don't know if that's where my files might be. Now that I have this OS installed, is there any way I can recover my data?

 

[newenglandmom2]

Just to be clear, after installing the temporary OS (with SIWI's help) I am able to bootr, and can see under "Computer" "4 Hard Disk Drives"

Recovery (C 7.8 GB free of 14.6 GB
Local Disk (E (cannot open due to error message)
Dellutility (D 91 MB free of 99.7 MB
Boot (X (501 MB free of 504 MB)

Under Recovery (C there are a lot of system files, but nothing like the documents I"m seeking.

Any help greatly appreciated. I feel like I've come a long way, and the files must be there, if I just knew how to get to them.
Thanks,
Diana

 

[newenglandmom2]

oops...those smiley faces are supposed to be colons!

 

[SIW2]

The drive letters are different from booted recovery media.

It looks like the partition E is your windows installation. That is the partition with the the I/O error.

 

[SIW2]

From the booted usb media, open a command prompt and type:

chkdsk /r /x e:

then press enter.

The x switch (/x) above unmounts the volume for chkdsk to scan and try to fix errors.

 

[newenglandmom2]

OK, trying that. Said type of file system is NTFS. Volume label is OS

Then, "chkdsk is verifying files (stage 1 of 5)"
after about 15 minutes, it's at "0 percent complete, 5788 of 328192 files processed.
So I think it will take quite awhile.

 

[SIW2]

Yes, it will take a while.

 

[newenglandmom2]

24 hours later, chkdsk completes! The highlights, as far as I can tell:

Stage 1, 24 bad files processed, 0 EA records processed, 124 reparse records processed.
Stage 2--23 unindexed files scanned, 0 unindexed files recovered
Stage 3--43213 files processed.
Stage 4--a lot of bad clusters replaced.
Stage 5--Free space verification complete.
Final analysis:
Adding 53 bad clusters to the bad cluster file
Correcting errors in the master file table's (MFI) DATA atrribute.
CHKDSK discovered free space marked as alllocated in the master file table (MFI) attribute
Correcting errors in the Volume Bitmap
Windows has made corrections to the file system.

in all the size statistics, notable was "240 KB in bad sectors"
Final line: Failed to transfer logged messages to the event log with status 50.

And now? Local Disk (E still does not look active (no data size below it). Maybe I need to reboot?

 

[SIW2]

Yes, try a reboot.

 

[newenglandmom2]

can't get it to start at all. Begins to power up, then shuts off. Should I take out the USB drive?

 

[newenglandmom2]

wait, starting now...

 

[SIW2]

Try it without usb stick.

If you stll then boot into your windows installation, try booting thre usb stick again and maybe you wil be able to copy your important files somewhere safe.

 

[newenglandmom2]

Yes! All my documents are there! I can't thank you enough for all your patience. My question now (and I hope my last), can I unplug the USB with the OS on it? So I can use another USB to copy files to?

 

[newenglandmom2]

I mean, I still have the USB with the OS files plugged in, and that OS is the one I'm seeing...

 

[newenglandmom2]

This seems like a silly problem, but I can't get any other USB drives or my Passport External Drive to show up. I plug them into the back, they light up and I hear the "connecting" noise, but I don't see them. And as I said, I'm afraid to unplug the USB drive with the OS on it...

 

[SIW2]

To see extra drives you have attached, rt click the icon at bottom rt of screen. A menu pops up - click "Refresh Explorer".

Otherwise, you can copy files to the booted usb, if there is enough space on there.

 

[newenglandmom2]

That worked, thanks again. You're pretty amazing, from my point of view! Will take me awhile to make sure all I want is copied. Then I will come back here and mark solved...with a little (or a lot!) help from my friends.

 

[SIW2]

Glad to hear it.

When you have copied your files to safety, you can try booting back into your installed version of windows. It might start up - depends where the damage was that chkdsk fixed.

 

[newenglandmom2]

OK, I have copied all my important files, whew. I can't think of anything else I need, except I was wondering if there's a way to salvage my Firefox bookmarks? I tried under Mozilla profiles but didn't see them.

 

[SIW2]

\Users\YourUserName\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles