Recovering data from a computer that won’t boot and has a bad dvd rom

If the computer will not boot and the dvd drive is bad. You will have to find an alternate way to boot the computer.

I used a thumbdrive since the bios supported it.

First get the thumbdrive bootable.

In order to get access to the windows drives you should do a
fdisk -l to see the physical devices.

You will have to mount whichever drive you need to get the data from.
mkdir /mnt/windows1
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/windows1 -t ntfs -r

Once you have the drive you need you can get your backup device setup.

I used a usb hard drive(beware some only turn on when active –MyBook)

Now you can do a copy
cp -r /mnt/windows1 /mnt/usbharddrive

Voila you have your valuable data again.