Best way to recover Data off a hard drive

[jakec]

G'day Folks,

I have a situation whereby my Mother's work computer has completely died and she has of course not been performing backups. Please also note that there is no driver Cd's or anything of the kind. Now she needs the data off the internal Hard drive of this machine (work documents etc). Unfortunately I have not got a clue about Hardware, I was thinking maybe if I plugged the HDD into an external hard drive caddy and extracted the data that way. I don't know allot about but you can get kits or something that you can plug the HDD into then this gets plugged into your computer via USB cable. I was watching some tutorials on youtube but I don't really understand too much about it. I've also looked on Google and that has only served to confuse me further...

Can someone enlighten me or give me some guidance perhaps?

Cheers,

Jake

 

[Yami]

Assuming that the hard drive is not the part of the system that died, then yes it will be easy to get the data off. You can either, as you said, plug it into an external HDD caddy, however the easier way would probably be to plug it in in another computer internally and copy the data using that computer.

The easiest but more expensive (in that there is a cost) way is to get a hard drive docking station such as this one (Newegg.com - Rosewill RX-DU101 Plastic 2.5" & 3.5" Black USB 2.0 Docking Station) which plugs in via USB. But I'd recommend the connecting-it-internally route since assuming you have cables that will be free (and inexpensive if not).