Dead Z77a mobo, looking for a way to boot the win7 install on another system

Friend had his MSI z77a-gd65 give up the ghost. It's throwing 19/55/4F codes and memory and PSU have been ruled out as the cause. There's no indication of any data loss on any of his drives and he had backups of everything critical, save for his bookmarks and saved passwords from Vivaldi and Firefox.

Is there a way to boot his Win7 install from the SSD or an image of it on another machine in order to export that data from his browsers? He was talking about tracking down a used GD65 and trying to boot after swapping that out, but there has to be a better option than that.

you can plug his drive into another pc and locate/copy the browsers' user profiles. i know firefox stores user profiles in the windows drive(C/users/"user's name"/AppData/roaming/Mozilla. copy the entire mozilla folder which has all your extensions, passwords, and bookmarks. on your new pc, install firefox, go to the mozilla folder of that new install and replace it with the backup you made previously. when you open firefox, it will have all your extensions, passwords and bookmarks. i'm sure you can somehow do the same with opera.

i don't know why there's an emoji there but that's a colon. lol. you may have to turn on show hidden files in the folder options to see AppData folder.

As it's not very safe to switch drives between windows computers, better option is to boot the other computer using a bootable linux usb, plug the source drive either directly or by USB to the other computer and move the firefox profile to some other media. That way you don't have to worry about hidden files or system restricted files or a possible infection moving from a computer to another.

If your friend would have logged in to a firefox account, all his browser bookmarks and stored passwords would have been stored there and he could just use any computer and log in to his profile.

B00nie said:

If your friend would have logged in to a firefox account, all his browser bookmarks and stored passwords would have been stored there and he could just use any computer and log in to his profile.

Click to expand...

Tell me about it. He's older and cloud averse.

if you've got a similar intel based system id try booting it. otherwise hook it up as a secondary in a working system and do what clownfish said.

I would try booting the computer using a linux live cd or usb just to rule out windows corruption. It's possible that the machine will boot long enough to rescue the data. Also, try removing the power cord from the computer, wait for 20 seconds, plug it back in and then try to reboot. If that fails, remove the power cord, remove the bios battery, short out the reset pin for uefi/bios, unshort it, replace the battery and try to boot. Sometimes UEFI/Bios just craps itself so bad that the machine fails to boot without a hard reset.