Question : Problem: Recover data from hard disk

Fist of all Hi to all this is my first question posted here,

I have been woking on fxing small pc problems for some years now on and off using the internet as my guru but I have run a groung with this one,

I have a pc here that is used as the main pc in a shop, It has all the stock and barcode system on it. its an old packard bell system, A few days ago it stopped booting, Just hanging on the loading xp screen with the loading bar moving across, Once or twice I got a BSOD with a hardwere failure notice but in the last day or so of trying to fix this I have not received a bsod and just get the hanging screen,

I decided to forget trying to fix the broken windows install and retreive the data from the disk but when I add the drive to my pc either by ide to usb converter or adding the drive as a slave my pc just hangs and will not boot,  I tried putting the drive back into the original pc and booting from UBCD but this also just hangs on the loading screen ( It will continue to boot if I remove the drive )


As the info on this drive is so importnat i would very much appeciate any help in retreiving it,

Thanks in advance

Anthony

Answer : Problem: Recover data from hard disk

If you can't get the systems to boot AND access the disk at the same time, you may have little reliable recourse other than to send it to a data recovery company.  Gillware is frequently mentioned here as being cheap and reliable - and no charge if no success.  www.gillware.com.

One option - that frankly, I wouldn't expect to work, would be to put the drive in a freezer for 20 minutes and then try to boot it - I would be careful with this, if I remember correctly, I've heard this can also HARM the drive if it's left there too long.

Another option - that could be very tricky, find an identical drive and swap circuit boards.  ABOVE ALL, DO NOT OPEN THE DRIVE.  That can EASILY result in SEVERE data corruption - so much that even a data recovery service couldn't help.