My chums computer starting clicking and flashing. It turns out the PSU was broken. He got his mate to get a new one. Then it turns out that the PSU had busted the motherboard.
But now it appears that the hard drive has been wiped.
That means he has lost all his photos of his kiddies first few years!!
Yeah, he should have backed everything up on discs but it's too late now!!
Help! Can anything be done to recover stuff from the HD?

put the hard drive in another pc as a slave drive, normally it will still read from a different operating system.

He's tried that but the HD wants a password to open it but it won't let him enter the password.

Set jumpers to slave. The computer should just boot up and you will be able to access all of the files on the other hard drive.

If that doesnt work. Log in as administrator with no password (windows safe mode bypass - most people dont know how to put a password in for it!)

David

Thanks for that, i,ll give it a whirl......

If none of that works, and he really wants it all back, send it to a data recovery firm. Might cost a couple hundred, but call it lesson learned and buy 2 drives next time.