Installation of external hard drive

The above, becomes very necessary for a lot of people who find themselves only having in their possession, their Vista Setup DVD in the case of a corrupt Windows Vista that will not boot at all even in safe mode. In these cases, one may want to perform a reformat and a fresh Windows Installation (especially in the case of virus attack) but would not want to lose his/her personal files. Now here's what to do:

First you will need another disk drive apart from the hard drive with the corrupt Vista Installation. It could be another hard drive partition on the same PC, an external hard drive, or a usb flash disk drive with enough space to copy the necessary files. In the case of an external drive, I recommend that you connect it to the PC before you turn it on.

Now turn on the PC, quickly insert the Vista Setup DVD, and boot from the CD/DVD drive. If your PC is not already set to boot from CD/DVD, you may have to go to BIOS setup to set the boot order to boot from the CD/DVD drive. The BIOS setup can be entered by quickly pressing the appropriate key which is normally shown on the screen when you turn on you PC. It's normally 'F2', 'Del', 'Esc' or another key depending on the system model. Most PC models also provide a key that can be quickly used to select the media to boot from when the PC starts.

After the Vista Setup DVD has Loaded, select the language and keyboard layout and proceed to the next stage. Click on 'Repair my computer' and wait for the resulting window. Now select your Windows and click 'load drivers'. You will be presented with an explorer window where you can browse 'My Computer'. Now in this mode, you will see and copy only folders not files but it does not mean that your files are not there. Since you can only copy folders, you may want to copy you 'Desktop' folder, and you 'Documents' folder and any other folder that you created that contains files that you don't want to lose. If you are wondering how to get to your Desktop and Documents folders, here's how: (Double click on the hard disk with the corrupt Windows Installation. Double click 'Users' and then double click on the desired user name. You will now see all the folders associated with the user name you selected including the Desktop and Documents folders). Right-click and copy the folders one after the other to you desired destination disk drive. Note that no copy progress is shown so you would have to look at your hard disk activity led to keep track of the progress (the hard disk led will be very busy blinking when copying and stop blinking when done). In the case of an external hard disk drive or a usb flash disk drive, you can use the activity led on them to keep track of the copying (they also stop blinking when copying is done). That's all. You have successfully backed up your files manually.

I recommend that, after your fresh installation, obtain a good Anti-virus software, update it and use it to scan your backed up folders before you access them. Hope this is helpful and I wish you all the best.