Recovering Music And Photos From Hard Drive

[BEENTHEREDONETHAT]

My computer bit the dust and get nothing on the monitor but no signal. Checked monitor on another computer and it worked fine. Fan comes on and CD slot opens. Nothing else happens. It is to old to spend $ repairing.

Is it possible to take the info off my Hard Drive and put it on new computer? Have lots of photos and music I don't want to lose.

Thanks

BT

[Cuban]

Yes (probably).

IMHO the best thing to do is obtain an external USB HDD, take the dead hard disk drive to a computer shop or helpful friend and get them to transfer all images, video etc that can be salvaged to the USB drive.

If you are willing to have a go yourself, buy your replacement PC and fit your old (assume IDE HDD) in side, the computer might be able to read the data.

There are a number of ways to recover lost data before all hope is lost - don't trust just one source to say that it's gone forever.

Good luck.

[thaimite]

My computer bit the dust and get nothing on the monitor but no signal. Checked monitor on another computer and it worked fine. Fan comes on and CD slot opens. Nothing else happens. It is to old to spend $ repairing.

Is it possible to take the info off my Hard Drive and put it on new computer? Have lots of photos and music I don't want to lose.

Thanks

BT

You have 2 easy options for getting the data off your old hard drive if you buy a new PC.

One is to have the drive installed inside the PC either as the main drive or a secondary one which is probably better, and then you would then access it as drive D: under windows. Your CD/DVD would become E:

The other option is to buy an empty USB drive case and put the old drive in there and use it as an external storage and backup. The economics of that would depend on the age and capacity of teh old drive.

Either way, assuming it was a faquklt of the drive that caused the PC to fail which seems unlikely from your description, recovering the data should be easy.

[webfact]

Sorry to learn your computer said good-bye.

If I read such post I always mention how important it is

to back up important data regularly.

If you buy a new computer take the old HDD with you. Tech guys are able to

transfer the data to a new HDD on the spot. Don't know how old your HDD is. If its too old I wouldn't put it back

into a brand new PC but have the data transferred only.

[BEENTHEREDONETHAT]

Thanks a lot for the inputs, sounds like all is not lost. Computer is roughly 10 years old and the operating system is ME. Don't remember the capacity of the hard drive, like the sound of buying empty USB drive case and using it externally.

Thanks again

Beentherehaven'tdonethat

[Cuban]

.... like the sound of buying empty USB drive case and using it externally.

Short story: In the dim and distant past I worked with front line users and their computer problems. One lady that earned huge amounts of money for doing bugger all had a favored 3.5 inch floppy disk. She used it for everything - it was partly her lucky charm even through it was many years old. Finally it failed to work after many weeks of making a 'funny noise', she said. I and another IT guy spent four days recovering the data lost on the disk by manual extraction and linking lost clusters using a simple text editor, this is before internet and free file recovery tools. We costed our combined time and compared that to the 20 Baht value of the much loved floppy disk the lady was shocked but only a little impressed that we got the data back.

Buy a new shiny USB HDD, inside the case wil be a fancy SATA hish not a smelly IDE one like you currently have.

Get the data off the old HDD, then and only then can you consider playing with it as an extra USB drive, a rest for your elbow or to cure the wobbly table in the kitchen.

[thaimite]

Thanks a lot for the inputs, sounds like all is not lost. Computer is roughly 10 years old and the operating system is ME. Don't remember the capacity of the hard drive, like the sound of buying empty USB drive case and using it externally.

Thanks again

Beentherehaven'tdonethat

If the PC is 10 years old the disk drive probably has less capacity than a 500 baht thumb drive!, and is not worth the cost of a USB case.

As suggested by others, get the shop which sells you the new PC to get the data off, but take the drive gome and put it somewhere safe in case they did not extract everything.

If you do not find any missing data in 6 months bin it

[SurfRider]

"I and another IT guy spent four days recovering the data lost on the disk by manual extraction and linking lost clusters using a simple text editor"

A great App for recovering files if the directory structure is damaged or the disk media itself is failing, is "Get Data Back"

I've had to use it several times when "all was lost", and it did a great job.

http://www.getbackdata.net/

( possibly available also via Torrent )

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