Asking on behalf of my mother: Windows 7 laptop from 2007 can't boot up in any way, how do i get the dvd in the disc drive and all of her important files n stuff out?

clown giggler 600 0 Reputation points
2025-07-22T16:11:27.7733333+00:00

Sooo basically, i accidentally shut down her laptop when i was like 12 installing the sims 2, and forgot about it, i come back way later, and all i see is white text on a plain red background saying like, windows didn't shut down properly, boot into these versions of safe mode? with there being safe mode with networking, safe mode with command prompt, and regular safe mode, also booting up normally. I tried every option, but none of them worked, except for regular safe mode, but then the mouse stopped moving on screen when i opened up "my files", so i shut it off and hit ESC when it was starting up, to get into the startup menu, then i pressed F11 to try and get to system recovery, and that did nothing, then i pressed F10 to maybe get into BIOS, nothing, my keyboard had stopped working, i've accepted the computer is gone and dead now, as the screen also only started displaying like glitchy red-black weirdness, but is there any way i can get the files onto my current computer without like dismantling it? My mum has some photos of me and my brother from when we were little, important legal stuff, etc, so how do i get it back? before the computer nuked itself i was also looking at updating to atleast windows 10 but seeing as the thing was constantly at 80-100% cpu usage on it's original OS that definitely wasn't happening. any extra info is that it had like no graphics drivers AT ALL

Windows for home | Previous Windows versions | Recovery and backup
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  1. Palcouk 2,906 Reputation points
    2025-07-23T11:03:16.24+00:00

    You remove the HD, place it in an external case and connect that to the usb port of a working PC and assuming the HD has not failed access the user account to retrieve the data.

    If the drive has failed and the data is important you sent it to eg OnTrak to recover data on a no recovery no fee basis

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