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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...
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