How Do I Get Data Off of the Hard Drive in a Dead Computer?

Extracting data from a hard drive in a dead computer isn’t typically difficult, unless it’s the drive itself that caused the problem.

My computer died on me. I can’t get it to boot up. I need to take the hard drive out and pull my files off from it. How do I retrieve the files from the hard drive in a dead computer? Thanks for any help you can give me.

This is a pretty common scenario. Depending on what caused the computer’s demise, there’s a relatively good chance you can retrieve the information off that hard drive.

Of course, if it’s the drive itself that caused the failure, things get a little more interesting.

There are several approaches to this problem. I’ll start with my favorite: not needing to do it at all.

Get your data from a recent backup

By far, the simplest solution to this problem is not needing to solve it at all.

By that I mean that a good backup strategy can almost eliminate the need to try to recover the hard drive in a dead computer.

Using another computer, or after the dead computer has been repaired:

• Restore as much as you want — potentially the entire system — from your most recent image backup…