I have a customer who's DELL Ispirion 9200 laptop took a dive 3 days after his warranty expired. He's shipping it off to DELL but wanted me to backup his data.
He was doing some work with Word and shut it off for the night. The next morning it wouldn't boot up. It would get to the BIOS screen and then stop. He shares the laptopwith his wife, it's their primary computer. Both are professionals that work at Johns Hopkins. They both do a lot of writing and some research on the internet. They also have a digital camera and store and edit their photos on the computer. They're running Windows XP Home Edition.
I removed the hard drive. It's a 120GB Toshiba SATA, and used my USB IDE/SATA transfer device and hooked it to my diagnostic PC. Something I do several times a week as part of my job. I accessed the drive with no problem. Ran a virus/spyware check using Webroot's suite of programs. No problems. I'm able to access all the data folders in My Documents, except his folder (named John). On this folder, I get access denied. I right click/properties and it shows folder as empty. He tells me he has several important documents in there. I checked the file/sharing tab and saw it wasn't a shared folder. I changed it to share, clicked for all users, ect., but when I check apply, I get an error that permissions could not be created and I'm back to square one. I've been able to backup all the other folders but this one.
He tells me the computer is not passworded. He and his wife use it for their personal stuff. It's not a work computer and there are no IT policies set on it. Maybe the drive is just bad, but why does it only single out this one folder? Any ideas? I've run out. Sure would appreciate some input.
Robert
hardware
prices 
