On 31/10/2015 22:50, Charlie Pridham wrote:

"Jeff Layman" wrote in message
...
On 31/10/15 10:48, Nick Maclaren wrote:
On 10/31/15 10:22, Charlie Pridham wrote:


I guess it might be possible to take out the hard drive and put it in
a powered external case with a USB connector, and use another PC to
try to read the disk contents and get anything of value off.

I have made a note of the other suggestions.

I do have an external hard drive caddy and yes my lap top reads all the
files fine

Do you have two PCs and a network? If so then share the drive on the
failing machine and use the oteher to copy everything of value onto
another physical drive. I worry that your main PC might have picked up
some malware so running a deep virus scan and malwarebytes might be
worth a punt. Otherwise it is quite possible that MS registry has
screwed up USB mass storage drivers somehow.

I have tried my own recovery disk which boots the machine up but it
still wont do a system restore (although I may try again)

As others have said booting off a live Unix or dedicated AV disk and see
if that can access mass storage USB devices will tell you if it is
hardware or software. Given that it seemed to arise after physically
moving things the suspicion is on hardware but never make assumptions!

I expect it may seem perverse to want a machine to run on Vista, which
although I much prefer it to windows 8 or 10 I would I know get used to
the latest version eventually! But Vista runs my Label station printer
software which neither newer version does without modification, i.e. I
can run the printer on newer software but that means redoing 3,500
individual plant labels.

I can see that would be a real PITA.


--
Regards,
Martin Brown