RETREIVING HARD DRIVE INFO FROM BROKEN COMPUTER?!

[wallydog]

Hi guys i was just wanting to pick your brains about getting photos off an old broken laptop.
I was told that you can simply remove the whole hard drive from the broken laptop and give it to a computer shop who can remove all the data/photos and put them on a disc for you.
I would imagine that would be possible but my question is:

Will this only retreive photos which were in folders on the computer when it packed in or will it also be able to retreive photos which were previously deleted from photo folders. I only ask because i had a lot of photos from a "once in a lifetime" holiday which i THOUGHT i had succesfully backed up to a flash drive but recently found out that it did not work properly and i had deleted the originals on the laptop to free up some space on the hard drive??

So to cut a long story short if i take the hard drive to a shop will i only get photos which were in current folders or will they also be able to retreive the ones i had deleted previously too??
Cheers
p.s some of the holliday photos had been emailed to me if that makes any difference!!

[Calum]

Only the ones that were on the disk when the laptop died.
But why not do this yourself and save the hassle?
It's fairly easy to slave the drive into a working machine and copy the data, saving yourself the money.

[wallydog]

Hi thanks for your repy. Im not much of a computer whizz but what piece of kit would i need to do this??i have another dell laptop but i assume  you cant just swap them?!
cheers mate

[Calum]

Do you have a desktop PC?
Or can you borrow one?
You won't be able to do this with a laptop.
The good news is, you need no extra kit, and the procedure is not complicated.

[patio]

This will let you hook up that HDD to any desktop machine and retrieve whatever data is left...

'bout 8 bucks.

[wallydog]

Hi guys. yes i have a desktop in the office. What exactly would i need to do? i have removed the current hdd from the laptop but thats as far as ive got. If i need that adapter where would i get one and are they all different or are all the ports the same? obviously you have to plug the adapter into the old hdd but where do you connect it to the desktop- does it have an external port at the back somewhere or do you have to access the inside? Also how do you then select this drive instead of the desktop one or does it automatically bypass it? sorry to be so ignorant!! cheers-john

[patio]

Hook it up to the laptop drive...then a power plug from the power supply...then it hooks up to an IDE ribbon cable like you have connected to hard drives and CDRoms in the desktop.

To be safe i would hook it up to IDE2 or the cable used for the CDRom's

Then when you boot up go to Windows Explorer and it will show as an additional hard drive...copy the data you need then power down dis-connect it and reboot to burn the data to CD's if you have a burner.

[michaewlewis]

It is possible to recover the files that you deleted. Check out this website:
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/uk/welcome.htm
This program is fairly simple to use and can successfully "undelete" files from your hard drive.