Recovering a dead laptop

[loukingjr]

I think this might be possible but I'm not sure. I have a friend who owns an HP laptop w/Vista with a dead display. I was wondering if there is a way to create a Windows VM, connect it to my Mac host and image her HD into the VM. I don't know if I can do this using just a USB port or if I can set up a shared folder etc. Any thoughts on this? She has data on the drive she needs to keep and it costs quite a bit to take it somewhere to have someone else pull the info off the drive. Actually I don't need the whole image, just the data.

thanks ahead of time.

[Y E T I]

Hook an external display to it and then network it to your PC and download the necessary files. You can even use the same monitor for both and just switch them back and forth. You can even use disk2vhd and make a complete image of the drive, probably using an external hard drive, or something like acronis to image it as well.

[loukingjr]

Hook an external display to it and then network it to your PC and download the necessary files. You can even use the same monitor for both and just switch them back and forth. You can even use disk2vhd and make a complete image of the drive, probably using an external hard drive, or something like acronis to image it as well.

that might work if I had an external display. I'm not sure the laptop even has video out. I'll have to check.

[mpack]

that might work if I had an external display. I'm not sure the laptop even has video out.

Oh, surely it does. A netbook maybe not, but a laptop will have either an VGA connector or HDMI connector round back, perhaps behind a panel.

[loukingjr]

that might work if I had an external display. I'm not sure the laptop even has video out.

Oh, surely it does. A netbook maybe not, but a laptop will have either an VGA connector or HDMI connector round back, perhaps behind a panel.

you're right. it actually has VGA and S video out although I didn't see an HDMI connector. and as it turns out of course her flat screen TV has VGA and HDMI inputs although I didn't see any S video connector. hopefully it's just the laptop's display and not the graphics chip and I can connect the two, and just copy what she needs off it onto a flash drive.

thanks for responding.