Recovering photos from a dead hard drive

[Awiserbud]

Hi everyone, I have an old windows XP PC with a dead hard drive, There are lots of photos on there that i would like to recover if i can, Most of them were backed up, something i did probably once a month or if i had important photos that i didn't want to lose, these are mostly snapshots but unfortunatly i never got round to backing them up before the PC refused to boot up.
I suspect the physical hard drive has a fault somewhere, it goes through the motions of booting up, but crashes halfway through and shuts down, almost as though part of the disc is damaged, it doesn't give me an error as you might expect if it was a software problem, and it won't boot up in safe mode or otherwise. Obviously i dont want to format the drive and risk losing the photos all together so what i was wondering was would it be possible to get another hard drive that i can boot up from and use the suspect one as a slave drive just to retrieve the photos.
I know this is possible with a good drive as i have done it before, but if the drive has poor or damaged segments would this prevent it being set up this way?
If not, and assuming the hard drive does indeed have damaged segements is there another way of retrieving files from it? I'm not worried about saving the hard drive, only the files.
Thanks.

 

[cgipson1]

There are several recovery tools you can get.. that will usually have a self booting CD. As long as the hard drive spins, and can be read from... you can recover data.

or you can just put the old bad drive in as a slave to your current pc... make sure the boot order doesn't change, and you should be golden (as long as you didn't compress or encrypt it)

 

[Awiserbud]

I only use a laptop thesedays so will have to get a 2nd pc or Hard drive and give it a try. there isn't any encryption on the bad drive, just the OS and files.
If that fails a self booting CD sounds like it could be an option. thanks.

 

[cgipson1]

I only use a laptop thesedays so will have to get a 2nd pc or Hard drive and give it a try. there isn't any encryption on the bad drive, just the OS and files.
If that fails a self booting CD sounds like it could be an option. thanks.

Does your laptop have E-Sata capability? If so, an external E-Sata drive dock would work...

Or even a USB based drive dock.. although they are slow...

Newegg.com - StarTech SATDOCKU3SEF Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA SuperSpeed USB 3.0 eSATA Hard Drive Docking Station with Cooling Fan

 

[Awiserbud]

I only use a laptop thesedays so will have to get a 2nd pc or Hard drive and give it a try. there isn't any encryption on the bad drive, just the OS and files.
If that fails a self booting CD sounds like it could be an option. thanks.

Does your laptop have E-Sata capability? If so, an external E-Sata drive dock would work...

Or even a USB based drive dock.. although they are slow...

Newegg.com - StarTech SATDOCKU3SEF Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA SuperSpeed USB 3.0 eSATA Hard Drive Docking Station with Cooling Fan

That..looks like what i need, I had no idea you could mount an internal HD like this. Its not too expensive either considering i will probably only use it once.
Internal hard drives seem to be a lot cheaper than external ones, I wonder if this would be practical as a back up storage system?

 

[cgipson1]

I only use a laptop thesedays so will have to get a 2nd pc or Hard drive and give it a try. there isn't any encryption on the bad drive, just the OS and files.
If that fails a self booting CD sounds like it could be an option. thanks.

Does your laptop have E-Sata capability? If so, an external E-Sata drive dock would work...

Or even a USB based drive dock.. although they are slow...

Newegg.com - StarTech SATDOCKU3SEF Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB3.0 & eSATA SuperSpeed USB 3.0 eSATA Hard Drive Docking Station with Cooling Fan

That..looks like what i need, I had no idea you could mount an internal HD like this. Its not too expensive either considering i will probably only use it once.
Internal hard drives seem to be a lot cheaper than external ones, I wonder if this would be practical as a back up storage system?

I have used it that way... with E-Sata! USB is so slow, it makes you want to die (althought USB 3.0 is better). You just need to be careful about storing the drives (static safe / moisture safe)

 

[Bend The Light]

I bought one of these to power up a dead drive...managed to get it going - it was some board or other that had died...this bypassed that...

USB 2.0 TO SATA / IDE CABLE FOR HDD WITH POWER ADAPTER | eBay

 

[Awiserbud]

I bought one of these to power up a dead drive...managed to get it going - it was some board or other that had died...this bypassed that...

USB 2.0 TO SATA / IDE CABLE FOR HDD WITH POWER ADAPTER | eBay

Might give that one a try actually, for that sort of money it doesnt matter if it doesnt work. Thanks.

 

[Bend The Light]

I bought one of these to power up a dead drive...managed to get it going - it was some board or other that had died...this bypassed that...

USB 2.0 TO SATA / IDE CABLE FOR HDD WITH POWER ADAPTER | eBay

Might give that one a try actually, for that sort of money it doesnt matter if it doesnt work. Thanks.

I used it a couple of times to get files from some old desktop drives I have...a handy piece of kit anyway if you're the sort to keep old 'puter bits around.

 

[Awiserbud]

I used to be, had Hard drives, CPU's and disc drives all over the house, I'm a bit of a hoarder sometimes, but thesedays the missus has decided she prefers the minimalistic look, if anything stays in one place too long it ends up in the garden shed out of the way (or out of her way should i say)
thesedays i only ever use the laptop so no need to keep spare parts.

 

[kathyt]

Hi everyone, I have an old windows XP PC with a dead hard drive, There are lots of photos on there that i would like to recover if i can, Most of them were backed up, something i did probably once a month or if i had important photos that i didn't want to lose, these are mostly snapshots but unfortunatly i never got round to backing them up before the PC refused to boot up.
I suspect the physical hard drive has a fault somewhere, it goes through the motions of booting up, but crashes halfway through and shuts down, almost as though part of the disc is damaged, it doesn't give me an error as you might expect if it was a software problem, and it won't boot up in safe mode or otherwise. Obviously i dont want to format the drive and risk losing the photos all together so what i was wondering was would it be possible to get another hard drive that i can boot up from and use the suspect one as a slave drive just to retrieve the photos.
I know this is possible with a good drive as i have done it before, but if the drive has poor or damaged segments would this prevent it being set up this way?
If not, and assuming the hard drive does indeed have damaged segements is there another way of retrieving files from it? I'm not worried about saving the hard drive, only the files.
Thanks.

I had the same thing happen with my older desktop about 4 years ago. I would not touch it, and call your computers tech support first. I was able to recover about 90%.