how to recover data from a hard drive?

[robinw]

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robin
unless you know lots about PCs don't try to do it yourself, you'll just get very frustrated and it's possibe to lose the data anyway.

We buy PCs (we have 7, software and training is our business) from a local shop that builds them to order (much cheaper than PC World and the like), and the owner will add your own drive in if asked. Could be worth trying that way.

Where are you? The shop we use is in Nottingham.

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Robin,

Well the op. sys shouldn't matter as long as they are both microsoft, it's whether the data files can be read by the applications on the newer machine (for example do you have MS Word on both machines?.

If your dh fitted a new drive all well and good, but sometimes you need to change internal switches on a machine to accept an additional drive, so make sure you have the documentation for your motherboard/existing drives available (actually it's my dh who does this in our house,so he'd know more).

Answer is yes it can be done, but do you know enough about your kit to do it yourselves?

It's very easy to do - it is just a case of removing the dead hard drive and installing it in a new computer box.

We have our PC's specially made for us which means they would be different to yours but i have to do this twice in the last month due to me hard drive failing.
All you litterally do is take outer casing off, unscrew screws holding hard drive in place, remove hard drive from slot and remove all cables that are attached - then just slot it into a different machine - fix all cables and screws back into place and hey-presto!

Yeah - just a word of warning re if you don't know what caused the last one - could be virus. This happened to me recently and I'm sure it was a virus.......

Works fine if the hardware and op sys are identical to start with. but tech specs change all the time, so the hardware settings are probably different on the drives, and the 98 op. sys will be configured for it's own hardware (Monitor etc) so at best will only boot in safe mode (if at all).

Anyway robin wants t hook it up as a second drive, not a replacement.

PS If your drives fail that often either treat your kit with more respect, or change your supplier !!

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