I'm trying to recover the data from my neighbour's laptop. My techie knowledge is just above his. His knowledge is zero.

Here is what happens when I run the program:

1) Double-click "PlugLab_Start.exe"

The Plugin Creator dialog box appears. There is a pop-up on top of the dialog with the message "This is the first time.....The help files have to be created." I have used the program several times, and the same message always appears.

2) Click OK to close the dialog.

3) Click "Select the PROGPATH"

4) Browse to:

c:\............\iRecover.exe

The Set Key Parameters dialog box appears, populated with "iRecover" info, plus some defaults.

5) Modify any values.

6) Click "Create the Plugin"

Normally, a pop-up with the following message appears: "A folder with the name .... already exists". I change the setting and again click "Create the Plugin", but nothing happens because of the already existing file. So I need to close everything, delete the offending folder, and start again.

If the folder does not already exist, I get the message "Plugin creation done. Please run Autohelp.cmd to complete the new plugin. Edit the SCRIPTS\PlugLabSettings.ini and add functions to Autohelp.cmd as required.

7) Click OK

The dialog closes. Under the dialog is a (Windows?) error message: "Windows cannot find "c:\Program"

Where is Autohelp.cmd?

By the way, PlugLabSettings.ini is not in SCRIPTS. It's in PLUGIN_LAB

Paths with spaces don't work well, thus c:\Program Files is not a good choice. Same with your Desktop. Create a folder such as c:\MyFiles or something similar and use it. You can also try putting quotes around your file names such as "c:\Program Files\yada.exe".



If your neighbor needed heart surgery would you attempt it also?

@ AlanDavidson
The PLUGIN_LAB is used for creating BartPE plugins with a setup-script.

It must be in the folder "plugin" of a BartPE setup like e.g.:
C:\Reatogo-240\plugin\PLUGIN_LAB\PlugLab_Start.exe
From what you write, it looks like you have it in some other location.

To recover files from a not bootable computer, you need a BartPE boot-CD like e.g. Reatogo-X-PE
For a successful build, make sure you meet the system requirements

Siegfried

I managed to work that out for myself when I was doing a UBCD4Win build. I got a message something like, "Can't find C:\Program " (note the space). I had to re-install UBCDWin out of "Program Files" and rebuild. Adding another couple of hours.

The SCRIPTS folder is here:

C:\Program Files\PeBuilder3110a\plugin\PLUGIN_LAB\SCRIPTS



I already created a BartPE CD previously. We could boot, and successfully see his Sony diagnostics stuff which was never visible in Windows Explorer. We could see the contents of the USB stick that we had inserted in case we found any files. We could see other drives, but could not access them. I think the format was described as "Raw". (Or was that from Knoppix?)

I then wanted to add iRecover to a BartPE build. The trial allows you to copy a single directory. That would have allowed us to copy his daughter's school project folder (which was all he cared about) to the USB stick. But I got lost trying to create a plugin using iRecover, so I built BartPE with GetDataBack, which already has a plugin.

Using our current BartPE, we can now see all his daughter's data, and most of his own data.

The problem now is trying to get it on to a stick, or my external USB 400GB drive. GetDataBack only allow you to copy with the licensed version. So I took my credit card out of my wallet (along with a lot of ancient dust and some dead Scottish moths). I was just about to type in the number when I realized the stress I might suffer by paying money. So now I'm trying UBCD4Win. (UBCD4Win is BartPE plus every freeware program in the known universe.)

I now have so much disk recovery stuff on my disk that I think the drive might fail. Then we would need to boot my neighbour's laptop with UCB4Win so that we could access my laptop from his laptop, so that we could create more recovery disks to boot his laptop from my laptop.

XCOPY "C:\Program Files\PeBuilder3110a\*.*" C:\PEBuilder3110a\ /s
RMDIR "C:\Program Files\PeBuilder3110a\" /s /q

would have been quicker.



UBCD4Win not withstanding I'm surprised your neighbor didn't offer to pay for the software. It's not that expensive.


Unlikely.

Have you tried CHKDSK on the failing drive? Or Testdisk? Both of which are free.

Speaking of free, you should add Runtime Software's DriveImage XML to your disk and do an image backup your neighbor's hd while it is still readable. Thus if things go terribly wrong you can recover the drive and restart trying to save files. In fact you can recover the individual files from the image backup.

Well, I did say that my computing knowledge was marginally above zero. I thought that any kind of copy or rename would misdirect all the pointers in the Windows registry. Hence the re-install.




All the forums seemed to be saying that I should write nothing to the drive until I have copied the data files to somewhere safe (see your next quote below). So I didn't see any point in running CHKDSK just to find out that there are errors on the drive. Maybe there is something about CHKDSK that I don't know about (very likely).

I ran TestDisk, because it's on the UBCD4Win CD. I can't remember exactly what it said, but the general message was that there were no files or directories on the disk.



That sounds interesting. But isn't that where I came in? Trying to find out how to add programs to a BartPE build. How would I do that?

Edited: OK. I found it. It's a plugin.

If you use UBCD4WIN it has a very complete list of tools already including DriveImage XML.
See http://ubcd4win.com/contents.htm. The file mangers included will tell you of you can see and copy the files from the drive.

There are no Registry entries for PEBuilder.


And good advice it is. CHKDSK without operands only reads the drive and reports problems.


That is not good news.


Yup.

And as Tom K. noted, it's on your UBCD4Win CD.

And since this is getting off topic we should move it to a more appropiate thread.