Windows 10: Recovering Photos from a dying (dead?) Internal Hard Drive

Greetings,

I have a friend who has a six year old HP laptop. The hard disk has been crawling for a while and they finally got the black screen of death. They booted into an HP Repair Utility, it tested the HDD, and came back with a code indicating it's either toast or nearly there. There was no way to boot into bios and they lack a second PC to create a bootable USB.

My first advice was to abandon this PC altogether. Since they believe $500-$600 is a lot for a new PC (yes, I know) I advised them to stick a Beelink GK55 Mini PC onto their flatscreen TV... which with wireless keyboard/mouse is around $259 these days. They only do the most basic stuff and that guy is actually up to that job.

The problem is the old PC has photos on that hard drive. I begged they upload to Google Photos immediately but the less tech savvy tend to say 'yeah, maybe later' and here we are with many photos in peril of being gone for good.

QUESTION: so what to do now?

1. Is a Geek Squad type the easiest solution? Like data recovery prices aren't so bad?
2. Is there a way to open up the laptop, remove the drive, somehow plug it into the new one, run a disk 'fix' app, and then drag photos over? (This hard disk died while a system update was running... if that indicates anything.)
3. If they buy a new PC I can help them create a bootable Linux thumb drive -- but will it see the C drive?

This is the exact type of fiasco I endeavor to avoid, but like I said, I have a friend...

:)

 

Is my hard-drive dying?

My acer aspire 5600U all in one PC has been acting up for a while now, for the ever since I updated to windows 8.1 years ago my computers hard drive has failed to recover from 100% disc usage...

With the picture provided would any of you assume the drives dying ?

If so, would It be wise to try and replace the hard drive with say-- an SSD in order improve performance? I'm just curious if this is even possible with it being an all in one system.. then again... its all possible with the know-how.

Any other suggestions?

 

recovering data possible dead hard drive

i was wonder if there is a way to recover data from a possibly dead hard drive?

few days ago we had a power surge in town causing an area wide power spike. lost power for only a few seconds but i think it was enough to cause damage. power came back and i tried to boot up my system but to no avail. i have 2-1 tb hard drives in my system drive one is a western digital 1 tb and the other is a hitatchi 1 tb. when i rebuilt the system and tried boot up, the WD hard drive was not recognized and the hitachi was reconized in BIOS, i assumed that it was a bad connection, checked and rechecked all cabling to the mother board. all connections appeared to be well connected,satas were enabled in BIOS. no noise coming from the WD hard drive, not sure if it is even spinning, but i think its dead. have important data on the drive i would like to recover.

so i guess my question is can i recover the data from the drive and possibly hot swap it to the working hitachi drive? are there any free or recommendable programs or devices i can use to even just recover the data from the WD drive available?

 

Hard Drive Data Recovery

got a laptop pata hard drive that makes a slight constant clicking noise. hard drive is more than likely dead/dying right... i can see that partitions of the hard drive in disk management and i can see the partitions in my computer but i can't get to any of the data.

any suggestions?