Date: 01/23/08 (Computer Help)    Keywords: no keywords

My neighbor has a Toshiba Satellite laptop with Vista Home Premium. He thinks the hard drive itself (the physical mechanism, possibly, but he's not sure) is dying, but he wants to know if he can get the files transferred on to an external hard drive even though his computer won't start.

Every time he turns it on, a screen asking him to choose between "Launch Startup Repair" or "Start Windows Normally" comes on, but both just lead to a black screen, or occasionally a screen that mentions something about "faulty hardware such as a hard drive or CD-ROM drive that is failing". It also mentions something about "Status: 0xc00000e9" and "Info: An unexpected I/O error has occurred."

Is there anything he can do? Or any way to get into command prompt and try to repair the hard drive if it's a bug problem or something as opposed to a physical damage problem? It'd be great even if there was a way to only get the files off, but not necessarily repair the hard drive.

Thanks ahead of time!

ETA: This also came up, "File: \Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe", "Info: Windows failed to load because the kernel is missing, or corrupt."

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/computer_help/859963.html