Is there anything i can do to save my old laptop? :(

I plan to buy a mac regardless of whether or not i get my old laptop fixed. ive had jsut about enough with windows and my magical puppy loving laptop

but i have some precious info that i need from my old computer..

so basically
PLEASE HELP ME!! if u can

the other day i got a virus and my computer just mysteriously shuts down.

when i try to turn my computer back on it prompts me to choose a path

if i want to go into safe mode, use last known good settings, or open windows normally, etc.

safe mode doesnt work, when i try to go into safe mode it gives me several lines of unrecognizeable gobbledygook that looks like this: //]]/\\131asdsjalak

when i try to use last known good settings it attempts to go into windows but then i get the dreaded blue fatal error screen message , it goes on and off too quickly for me to read what it says and then it makes my computer shut down

the same thing happens when i try to open windows normally


is there ANY way i can save the content of my computer???????




usually when i do "last known good settings" it works, but not this time!

There is, but it is a very detailed process to go through for the non-techie. First question is what version of Windows were you using? XP, 2K, 98? Regardless, you basically need to boot with a cd and get it to a "dos" prompt where you can run some utilities to get the virus disabled. Depending on which version of Windows you have it is either very easy, or not so much to get it there. Once there, "sysclean" is a good program for cleaning modern viruses using a startup cd and just that program. You have to know how to get it into that mode though and must use startup disk or cd.

There is also another method.
1) Download an Ubuntu Linux image and burn it to a CD(should be bootable).
2) Insert the and boot from the CD.
3) The CD will boot into Linux environment and will display all the content/partitions on your HDD on the Desktop.
4) You can copy whatever you need into a external HDD (fat32 formatted) or transfer it through a FTP client to any other PC/Mac.

Or, you could buy an external firewire/USB caddy (2.5") and take the hard drive from your old laptop and connect it to another computer then copy your documents off.

If you are going to be using a Windows machine, make sure you have an AV scanner to make sure it doesn't infect the other computer.

i'm with wicker_man.

then you can format it and use as an external drive for your new mac.