Hi
My friend's computer seems to have given up!

When you switch it on you normally hear the fan, then the hard drive kicks in and whirrs quietly during start up.

But now when switched on, just the fan kicks in - is the motherboard gone or is it likely to be the hard-drives?

If so, can I get the stuff (tons of music) from the hard drives if they're knackered?

No input signal appears on the screen.

Cheers,

Since you get nothing on the screen, my guess is that the problem is power supply or motherboard. That is "good" news. You can remove the drive and attach it to another computer to rescue the files on it.

You didn't say if this was a laptop or desktop. If a desktop, you generally just pop the drive out and pop it in to another desktop. If a laptop, it is more difficult--both getting it out and attaching to another computer. The way to go here is to get an inexpensive USB-attached hard drive case (just make sure it is the right size for the drive-desktops are 3.5in and laptops are 2.5in in general). Note you can do this for a desktop drive as well, but you don't have to. Here is a page of examples.

As sad as it is for a computer to die, the most important thing is the data. It sounds like in this case, the data should be fine.

Best of luck,
WallyH

Hi,

Thanks. It's a desk-top. It has two hard drives (C: and D:) sorry for my ignorance in these areas - can I just unplug them and put them in another PC or external hard drive to save the data or at least make sure it's still on them? (It's my friends PC and if I lose the data I'm a dead man! ).

I'm not sure what you mean by getting a USB-attached hard drive case..

Cheers,

Gotcha on losing data=dead man... just don't FORMAT, PARTITION, or ERASE and you should be safe.

Depending on which drive has the data you want (I am guess BOTH), you will remove one drive at a time and attach it to another computer, save the data, repeat with other drive. Note, that if it is his computer that is dead, then the data should be just fine and once he replaces his computer, he can just pop the drive in that system. Although you say it has 2 drives (C: and D:), there may just be one physical drive with two partitions (don't fret over the semantic, however)--the procedure is the same.

This is a pretty good description of what needs to be done if you are just adding the friend's drive to your computer. Note that there are TWO main ways to interface a drive to a computer. The older one is EIDE and the new one is SATA. You cannot interchange these drives, and if your new computer does not have EIDE support, you cannot just plug the old drive into the new computer. In this situation, you will need to go the USB enclosure route.

The safest route is to use the USB enclosure method. What this entails is removing the friend's drive (use the instructions in the link above) and inserting it into a USB enclosure. Note that based on whether the friend's drive has a SATA or EIDE interface, you will need to by the appropriate USB enclosure. The nice thing about this method is that you do not need to open up your computer at all, nor fuss with jumpers on the drive. In addition, you'll have a handy backup device once the friend's data is safely copied off. Note, I would only pay less than US$50 for such an enclosure--more if you get it from a local shop.

Essentially, the USB enclosure is a small box that the drive is inserted into, allowing a USB cable to be used to connect the drive to another computer. Here is a link to a hopefully better description. Please note I have not used this specific product, but they had the best photos I could locate.

Best of luck,
WallyH

Thank you VERY much!!