Asus won't boot, trying to save pics with usb

[esenef]

My asus 1005p crashed. It would not boot, so I got rufus and win7.iso put on usb. It finally booted but it wants to reinstall windows 7 and the tutorials I've seen made it look like I could boot then click and drag to copy files. It ended up freezing in "starting setup" anyways. I am not a computer expert by any means, but got this far and am stuck. Thank you in advance for any help.

 

[skittle]

the windows boot image does not have an easy way to recover data files. (there is a command prompt you can access)

Instead I suggest you get a Ubuntu iso to load on the usb and boot from that. You can copy all your files to an external disk drive this way.

 

[esenef]

the windows boot image does not have an easy way to recover data files. (there is a command prompt you can access)

Instead I suggest you get a Ubuntu iso to load on the usb and boot from that. You can copy all your files to an external disk drive this way.

Ok, thank you. I haven't tried ubuntu yet. I will let you know how it goes.

 

[esenef]

the windows boot image does not have an easy way to recover data files. (there is a command prompt you can access)

Instead I suggest you get a Ubuntu iso to load on the usb and boot from that. You can copy all your files to an external disk drive this way.

So ubuntu worked, my internal hd was not present under devices. I did bring it up in /data by following another tutorial. I managed to save some pictures, but a very small percent. Most of the folders are empty and contain zero files. Is there a way to recover those without overwriting my external hd and deleting the content that is already on there.

 

[skittle]

Maybe you have corrupt filesystem? You can try to repair [From a Windows Installation Image] using the repair utilities you can get a command prompt and run the command:
chkdsk /r

Which will find and repair bad sectors and meta data on the filesystem

If this doesn't fix then you can proceed [carefully] with data recovery tools:

1) Always make an image first. Then try to recover files from the image. Never work directly from the HDD as you may accidentally delete/overwrite some stuff unintentionally. [or if you feel brave, at least mount your hard drive as read only)
Usually I make an image with 'ddrescue'
2) Use recovery programs like 'foremost' or 'photorec' on the image.

The Ubuntu Wiki has a nice article on using these kinds of tools
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery