Friend's Hard Drive died, best way to go?

[RoboG2]

My friend's hard drive just died ad asked me what to do.  I know that I would probably be able to get some of the stuff back, but what do you think is the best way to go?  What program should I use?  Any suggestions?

[shmokes]

Depends what you mean by dead.  If it is just no longer booting into Windows, but is still being recognized by the BIOS you may just have a corrupt boot sector, which is excellent.  In that case just hook it up as a secondary drive in another computer and Windows will automatically mount it and you can copy the data over in explorer.  If it's dead as in the circuit board is fried and the drive isn't even spinning up or severe data damage it will be much more difficult.  Data recovery firms would charge you a couple grand to get the data off it.  Data recovery software is not very useful.

[RoboG2]

I don't really know whats wrong with it being that I have not even been over there yet, but I will see soon.  Thanks for the reply.

EDIT:  From what I hear, it's a Mac.  Would recovery be the same; would I be able to recover data on a pc?

[shmokes]

I don't know Macs well, but i don't think your PC will be able to read the drive.  It will recognize it, but no MS Operating system has built-in support for the file system that the MAC OS's use.  I think there is a program you can get to add some support, mainly for people who want to use an iPod between both a PC and MAC but don't want to use FAT32 for some reason, but I really don't know if it would accomplish what you want.  It sounds like the best bet would be to replace the hard drive in the MAC, reinstall the OS and then hook up the dead hard drive to the MAC and see if you can access it that way.

[paigeoliver]

I believe most of the assorted "Live boot" Linux CDs should support all the filesystems needed to copy the files.

[RoboG2]

Does anyone know how to do it with knoppix?

[Stingray]

Ask your buddy if he still has the OS install CD that came with the Mac. If he does stick the CD in the drive and hold down the C key while it starts up. It should boot from the CD. If the problem is with the OS and not the drive itself, you can just reinstall the OS and everything else that was on the drive should still be fine.

-S

[RoboG2]

Well, my friend apparently got his wording wrong.  He thought the hard drive was the actual system itself.  So the system does not turn on at all.  I still havent been over there yet, but thanks for the rplies.

[shmokes]

There is absolutely nothing that could cause that besides the power supply.  Unless it's one of a few other things like the motherboard, but seriously it's probably the power supply. 

That's good news.

[DrewKaree]

In case that power supply is too expensive, it's a Mac.  Tell him to give it to his wife to turn into some artsy fartsy thing for around the house, like a fabric covered doorstop or some other girly-crappfty thing....or use the shell for something sci-fi looking. 

Macs are cool looking.  Usually.