Question for all my fellow nerds out there... I'm trying to help someone recover their crashed HP laptop. The laptop runs Windows XP and gets a blue screen of death on startup. Normally this might not be too difficult to overcome, but he doesn't have the Windows installation cd and doesn't remember the BIOS administrator password in order to change the boot order so that I can boot up from a cd. I was able to remove the hard drive and boot up using a Ubuntu (Linux) "live" cd. Of course, the problem is that the hard drive is not connected, so I can't replace the corrupted file that appears to be the cause of the BSoD. Would it be inadvisable to try to connect the hard drive while the laptop is up and running (Ubuntu)? The other obvious choice is to connect the damaged hard drive to a pc as a second hard disk and repair it there. But it looks like I would need an adapter to connect the laptop hard drive to a standard IDE cable, which I don't have and would prefer not to have to go buy. Can anyone think of any other options? Thanks in advance. Edited to add: Before I removed the hard drive, I tried both booting into safe mode and booting the last known working configuration (or whatever it's called) and both failed to avoid the BSoD.
A quick update. After putting the hard drive back in place (while shut down), the laptop was then able to boot up from the Ubuntu 'live' cd, which it wasn't doing before I removed the hd. I then mounted the hard drive in Ubuntu, replaced the corrupted file indicated in the BSoD "Stop: C0000221" message and everything's now hunky-dory.