I figured scince this is off topic chat, I might as well ask.
situation: The OS on my 2.5 HDD laptop got corrupted but there is some documents that I want to pull from it.
-I have an enclosure, but the problem is that I think it has to be reformatted before being able to be used, and then I lose all my data… any ideas?
Get a Linux Live CD and boot from the CD drive. Use the Linux utilities to recover whatever you can of your data.
Live CDs are a great idea guys, I was just working on the ultimate boot CD. Thanks, I will get back with results
now im getting CRC errors(cyclic redundancy). Thanks for trying guys and great ideas
If the files are text files or images, ignore the crc errors and save them anyway. In a text file, a crc error may mean a typo, in an image, a little bit of noise (unless the error is in a header block or some other housekeeping data.)
Try PC linux, and choose the “To Ram” option. This will free up your cd drive so you can burn backups of the data.
CRC is pretty severe though , you might not be able to write that data to any medium.
CRC is a checksum. Having an error in one means the sector has some bits out of order, corrupt or missing. File reading programs may not take the chance the data is good and just report the error. If you can tell the program to ignore the CRC and open the file anyway, 9 times out of 10 you’ll have a minor error in the data. The tenth time the error will be in the housekeeping data, and the file will not reconstruct, or you’ll get a whole sector of garbage. If you have a hard disk sector reading program, you may be able to work around a CRC error, but it’s time consuming and requires detailed information about how your hard drive is formatted at the hardware level.