My work laptop died yesterday morning. It was acting very odd on Friday (i.e. very slow and a lot of “not responding” going on) and finally yesterday morning I got a fatal Blue Screen of Death. My boot file was corrupt and I was up shit’s creek. I hadn’t backed up my stuff in months and that stuff was not something that I could not lose. I knew the drive wasn’t dead but my windows install was shot. I needed to find some way to boot it up so I could get my precious stuff off of it.

My biggest issues was that my Dell Latitude D420, with its small form factor, does not have a CD-ROM drive and unfortunately I had never asked my IT guy for an external USB CD ROM drive. My only option was to find some other USB device that I could use as a boot device. Thank god there are people out there that had already figured it out for me.

Here is how I did it:

• I bought a $25 4GB USB Fob from MicroCenter.
• I downloaded and installed Bart PE on another Windows Machine that I had to work with. This program allows you to build a bootable Windows ISO that you can burn to CD. (You will need a legal install of Windows to pull this off)
• I followed the directions that came with Bart PE and created the image.
• In order to be able to create a bootable USB drive and not a CD I had to download an evaluation version of Windows server 2003. There are a few Flash RAM system files you need to leverage. The Bart PE directions explain how to do this.
• I downloaded and installed PE2USB GUI. This is the key program that I used to properly format my USB drive, make my drive bootable, and load the Bart PE Image to the drive. I recommend using this program instead of the command line version that comes with Bart PE. If your instance does not boot properly try playing around with the different options available on the GUI. It took me a few tries to get mine to work.
• I adjusted my laptop’s BIOS so it booted from a USB device first. If you don’t have that option, then you probably can’t use this technique.
• I plugged my USB Fob into the lone USB port (grrrrr!) on my machine and turned it on. To my surprise the machine booted off of the USB drive and loaded a trimmed down version of windows via Bart PE. I was now able to see everything on my hard-drive!
• Since my USB drive has 4GB of storage and the OS image takes only a small fraction of that, I was able to move my files from my hard-drive directly to the USB drive.
• After the files were moved, I unplugged the drive from the busted laptop, plugged it into my MacBook Pro, and transferred the files to my external hard drive.

It worked like a charm! Now I have all of my files backed up and my IT guy can just blow away my laptop and rebulid it for me. All I have to do is tuck my little “Bootable OS on a FOB” away in a safe place just and I will not sweat it if I have to deal with this again in the future.

Enjoy.

***NOTE***This process took me 2 days to figure out on my own, but if you follow the steps I laid out it shouldn’t take more than an hour to get it working. If you have questions please don’t hesitate to comment and I will help with what i can.