Question Can I recover my files from a corrupt windows and keep laptop drivers?

[vincentensimon]

Hi, I am trying to fix someone's laptop that keepscrashing. While booting it gives me the error of critikal process died. I have tried botting into safemode, sfc and other commands in cmd but nothing works. I can't go back to a restore point or backup. The laptop is a leneovo which had windows 8.1 preinstalled but the owner upgraded to windows 10.

I have read somewhere that I can reset the pc but keep personal files. This means all drivers will be uninstalled. Now since it is a laptop and drivers being rather annoying, I was wondering wether it was possible to reset the pc (and keep the files), then pull the files off and use the recovery partition for the drivers. Is this possible or does the pc format that part when resetting? And let's say that I recover, will I be able to reinstall windows 10, or will it go back to windows 8?

PS. would resetting it and keeping the files, and then just installing the drivers from the manufacturer be safer? I don't want the person to be stuck with windows 8.


I know this is quite a long story, but thanks in advance,

Kind regards,

Vincent.

 

[Grobe]

Ok, lucky you get a computer probably packed with appz and really messed up.

Ok - here is what I would do (if paid to)

• Get a Linux live-cd (or you make a USB stick bootable, use Rufus or similar software to make it bootable). Linux Mint, Ubuntu will do just fine.
• Go get a portable hdd (or another usb stick big enough) so you can copy all your friends files to.
• Boot the laptop using the Linux live-cd.
• When the desktop is ready, you insert the other USB storage to the computer (where you want to copy files onto)
• You can navigate in file system on the local disk and copy any files over to the other usb drive.
• When finished copy all files, right click the desktop icon for the USB storage and eject (or unmount) before you disconnect.

Then reinstall Windows and copy back the files.

 

[geofelt]

I have another suggestion:
Buy a ssd of sufficient capacity for what the user needs.
Replace the HDD with the ssd and do a clean install of windows 10 on it.
Buy a usb to sata adapter cable and use that to copy back any needed user files.
If you can find the laptop drivers there, you could install them.
But likely you would be better off downloading the requisite drivers directly from Lenovo.
The user will be amazed at the performance boost she gets from a ssd.