A question for all the computer experts...

United States
February 1, 2013 2:42pm CST
So here's the situation, I had a desktop computer for a few years (the black Dell Dimension 4200) I got my money's worth out of that thing..I am not sure what happened really..one day it went to blue screen and it seemed like it was either infected with a virus or just ready to die on me...so after holding on to the tower for what may be two years (I sold the rest of the parts: keyboard, mouse, speakers, monitor) I want to take the pictures and some other stuff off the hard drive of that computer and possibly put it on my laptop (I want to put the pictures safely away in my photobucket) So my questions are: Is there a way to get the stuff I want off the hard drive? And if there is, can I do it myself or will I need to take it to a computer shop?
1 person likes this
7 responses
@vbpujara (646)
• Rajkot, India
6 Feb 13
Blue screen indicates problems specially related to hardware, first check yout Ram is properly inserted or not,if you have some knowledge with your CPU manually remove Ram and insert it, second if you can start PC in Safe mode try it and backup it into removable drive. Then not remove harddisk by experts and insert in any other PC to check it.
@Zer0Stats (1147)
• India
2 Feb 13
Do your hard drive get configured on computer?
@johndur (3052)
• Pasig, Philippines
2 Feb 13
just buy a hard drive enclosure and put the hardisk there than plug it in any usb port and get eveything in that hard drive.you can buy it in any computer parts store.
@rog0322 (2829)
• Cagayan De Oro, Philippines
2 Feb 13
Hi, You could slave the HDD on some running system by connecting it to the mainboard via the IDE connector. What put us off is that most of the boards nowadays are on the SATA type and there's no way you can slave an IDE HDD to it unless you have a SATA-IDE converter at hand, that includes the power supply for the drive too. If you manage the interface, pray hard that the HDD still spins up and can be detected on the CMOS. If it is the case, you can retrieve whatever is there by copy pasting it to a new directory. If not then, there's nothing you can do short of calling in personnel from the Crime Scene Investigation lab to read the disk from a special machine.
• India
2 Feb 13
From the error description, it seems your hard disk is ok. Perhaps your motherboard or the RAM has got corrupted and would have needed replacement.I think you should be able to retrieve things from your hard disk.I can suggest three things here.One connect this hard disk as a slave to another laptop/computer.And then you can move things to another location.This could be to external hard disk or any preferred location on the new system.There are some freeware for extracting data from corrupted disks.You can install them as well to retrieve data from deleted or corrupted sectors.There is another set of freeware which can extract data from corrupted hard disk.Else you can buy them online after checking the demos.If you are not comfortable with any of these, you can take it to any computer shop as you mentioned.They would ask a good charge.Usually depending on the space used in hard disk, the data retrieval could take time.I did it 3 years ago and it took me personally 3 days for the whole thing to complete.The data was around 120 GB.So think of all of these.Wish you good luck with things.Thanks!
• India
2 Feb 13
Your hdd is still alive, connect it in another PC and copy it. If you do not understand fully the last line, plz take help of a technician. All the best.
@Asylum (47893)
• Manchester, England
1 Feb 13
Assuming that the hard drive is undamaged and that you simply had a software problem then it is not a difficult task. However, it does depend on whether you have another computer and internet access. If you do not, then you can always ask a friend to help. I would suggest downloading the latest version of Ubuntu, which is freely available from their site. This will be in the form of an ISO file, which can be burned to a CD to create an installation disk. Once you have the disk, place it in the drive and start the computer. You do not need to install the program because it will run as a live disk, so simply select that option. Once the program has loaded you can access the Windows folders from it and then copy the files to a USB drive. It is not necessary to be able to start Windows because the program will see the files anyway. If you do not have a monitor or mouse etcetera then obviously this cannot be done. In that case remove the drive and ask a friend if they will connect it to their computer. They should be able to read the drive from their own operating system and copy the files for you.