The hard drive on my Dell crashed, is there ANY way that I can retrieve my pictures?

Question

Ok, I know that I should have backed up my pictures file but I was stupid and didn't do it. So is there anyway at all that I can retrieve my pictures? The computer will not boot up at all, so I don't know if there is too much I can do at this point, but if you have any useful suggestions I would really love to hear them. Thank-you! :)

Answer 1

I don't think so. contact dell to be sure and see what you can do.

Good luck.

Answer 2

The first poster has the right idea. You can take the hard drive out of the old computer and place it in another computer temporaily, attached to the cables normally used for the CD drive.  Boot the computer and if the hard drive is still readable, it will show up on the computer in place of the CD drive (usually as D:).  You can then drag and drop your picture over to the regular hard drive of the computer, and then later (when the second hard drive has been removed) burn them to CD.

Good luck....

Answer 3

If you want to recover your files, it wouldn't be too hard...here is two options, the first being the safest.

1) Take the hard drive out of your computer and install it as a secondary drive in a functional computer. Copy and paste files.

The two cables already in your PC you would connect to the hard drive. (these are the same as what connects your CD/DVD ROM). There should be an extra "set" of these cables if you only have 1 CD/DVD ROM drive, else you will have to unplug one of the drives.

2) Use file recovery software after re installing windows Here is some free software to recover your files: http://recuva.com/

Answer 4

well there are adapters you can get that will let you access the hard drive on a desktop PC and depending on how bad it is you might be able to still pull the pictures off of it. Also you might be able to put your windows disk in and do a repair and get it working well enough to atleast copy the pictures to a flash drive but i would go for the first method cause you will have more options to try if the picture files are corrupt

Answer 5

It depends on how functional the hard drive old hard drive is. If it just has some bad sectors, but still spins, you can recover most of your data when installed as a secondary hard drive. The other option is to take it to a data recovery place near you. It can be expensive, but they can take each hard disk out and attempt to recover what ever data was not lost in the crash.