How do i remove pictures from a crashed hard drive?

Question

I have a gateway computer and recently the Hard drive crashed. There are valuable pictures on there so if anyone could please...explain to me if or how I can get them off of it I would greatly appreciate it!

Answer 1

If it is a desktop the quickest way to see if anything is salvagable is to attach the hard drive as a slave drive and see if anything is readable or not. Obviously you need a formatted, working hard drive available to do this. I could do this on my laptop but not all are configured with 2 drives or have 2 slots, but if yours does this would work on a laptop as well.

Have you booted up in safe mode and are any file visable? Generally that is a good way to tell if it's worth the effort to do this. When I had a Gateway PC they told me I needed to reformat and the entire contents was lost BUT since I could boot up in safe mode and see the contents I figured out to make it my slave drive and I was able to save everything.

Odds are if you can't boot in safe mode your data is likely lost. Even in the worst case there are data recovery companies that can save what looks lost BUT they are very, very expensive. And as mentioned there are other programs that attempt to save data. Wish you gave more info into "crashed," and the exact status of the drive.

I know this is too late, but this is why it's a good idea to back up regularly, esp with CD's and hard drives being as cheap as they are today. Hope you manage to save what you want off this one, and like most of us it takes one big crash to get better at backing up. (I always try to run a slave drive now where I back up key files since odds are good that both drives won't go down at once).

Answer 2

Get an external HD enclosure and see if anything is readable off that drive. There are programs around like SpinRite that can attempt to rebuild you drive for you. I have had some good success with it, and also a few unrecoverable drives.

Otherwise, you can find out who in your area does data recovery. It won't be cheap.

(Think about it, if your HD crashed, then it is broken. If it was easy to fix - i.e. read the drive - then it wouldn't cost so much right?)

Answer 3

I could be wrong, but once your hard drive goes there is nothing you can do to retrieve anything off of it. tha is why some people burn or destroy them.

GOOD LUCK I HOPE YOU FIND AWAY TO GET WHAT YOU NEED THOUGH