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[hoj]

A mate of mine has bought a new PC its an acer desktop mini.
His old PC has viruses galore  (trojans etc etc)  on the HDD and he says it wont even switch on/power up anymore.
Thing is he has NOT backed anything up and has a lot of pics and other important info on the HDD.
How does he go about getting the info from the old HDD to transfer to the new PC

[Plomien]

He might be able to remove the hdd from the laptop but it seems odd it won't power up.
If it fires up then try using a usb stick to transfer the info, there was a link on here that had a recovery tool disk that was quite handy, I will see if I can find the link as it had built in antivirus as well which may fix the laptop

[Terbs]

Can't he fire up at all ?

I'm not familiar with laptops, but with standard PC, I would put in another hard drive....disconnect original drive if you are not familiar with loading windows, then load windows on the new drive, put back original drive as a SLAVE drive....then get out the files you want. Be careful, though, just take ordinary files, as those viruses attack exe. files and if you copy programs over you could inherit the worm.
OR you could attach the 'bad' drive to another computer as a slave and get in that way. Again care is needed to not infect the other computer.
If you are not familiar with the guts of a computer, you should get help and not do it yourself.
I know its not possible all the time, but I have about 5 drives on this computer, and C drive is only used for the Operating system. All other stuff is on other drives, (Flight Sim) (Rfactor). So when a virus comes in and is fatal, I just wipe C drive and reload windows. Takes about an hour and I am up and running. If you are trying to get back Excel and Word files you should not have any problems getting them from a slave drive

[Terbs]

I do find it strange it does not fire up.....
Thats normally a power supply problem, or a knackered HDD

[Mr Skrunts]

Where abouts did the OP say it was a dead laptop?

[Mr Skrunts]

If possible the HD needs removing and slaving onto the new PC, but the new PC needs to be fully upto date on AV sovtware first.

If possible I would actually fit the old hard drive into a usb external caddy amd plug in that way.

[Terbs]

IF....it does fire up, and gets to Desktop, you could try a System Restore. (XP) If you get the message 'Your System Cannot be Restored....then that usually signals using the Windows disks (recovery or fresh load.
Path is ....Start/Accessories/System Tools/ System Restore....and follow easy instructions

OR

Start/Help and Support/Tools/System Restore.....

[Chris_H]

You can get adapters that allow 2.5in HDDs to connect to desktop systems although I've not used one.  If the HDD is not foobarred then the data can be copied to wherever he likes.

Alternatively he can google data recovery services who can do a lot more at a higher price.

[edit]I see it's (probably) not a 2.5in drive in which case, it may plug straight into the new PC as a second HDD.  Copy data files across, run virus scan on them and re-format the original disc.  Only possibly problem is old one could be IDE and new one only SATA - may need an adaptor.[/edit]

[Psychoca]

IF....it does fire up, and gets to Desktop, you could try a System Restore. (XP) If you get the message 'Your System Cannot be Restored....then that usually signals using the Windows disks (recovery or fresh load.
Path is ....Start/Accessories/System Tools/ System Restore....and follow easy instructions

OR

Start/Help and Support/Tools/System Restore.....

You need to get hold of a disk called Hirens Boot CD...  Which has all the tools and utilities to clean the dirty drive.  There are plenty of virus's about which will break windows enough for it not to start up...

Then transfer of data can either be done by taking drive out and putting in a USB caddy or simply a reasonable size pen drive....

[Terbs]

Where abouts did the OP say it was a dead laptop?

If that quote was aimed at my post, the reference was to laptops and desktop PC's but meaning If its a laptop I am unfamiliar with them, but if its a desktop this is my route 

[Xplicit 2.0]

in these cases i would try using an OS that boots from disk (Ubuntu or the like) then try transferring files on flash drives or sending it through the network to (wireless may not work so a wired one would be best) or as someone else mentioned a HDD dock