System restore help needed

I am trying to help a friend to restore their pc with the last known good configuration or restore the system without losing all their data.
OS- Vista
Toshiba

Her husband installed Yahoo for their email and had a few issues but all issues worked out. They turned of the pc and turned it on the next day and get the black screen that tells them they need to do a system recovery. Their issue is that they have a small business with all their data on this pc and with a system recovery they will lose all that data. They called Toshiba and they stated also “the system recovery will wipe out the pc data and they will lose all data on it”.


Did system restore and some error messages below:
Startup repair V2
Auto failover
Problem signature 2 6.0.6.6.001.18000
Signature 3
Signature 4
Bad driver
System restore

Thank you for any help you may have.
:)

I hope you have suitably chastised your friends for not having thier business files backed up? Small firms go bankrupt because of this kind of thing :eek:

In fact, because this data is likely to be so critical, my recommendation would be to buy a brand new hard drive and do a clean reinstall of Vista on it. When that is done, install the old drive as a slave, and hopefully you'll be able to copy the data with no problems.

That new hdd would be the easiest, and fastest way in my book too.

Yeah buy a new hard drive, and take the old hard drive to someone like best buy, or anyone that does file recovery and have then pull all the files that are needed and have it backup on a CD. You might tell them to back up whatever they can that are common files and business docs.

Thank you all for you quick reply. They purchased the laptop from best buy so they are going to take everyone's suggestion and talk to best buy about getting a new HD and getting the files moved over. They will also being purchasing a new backup system also.
Thanks again.