I have two old IDE hard drives that I need to get some data from. Both the drives are boot drives with windows XP installed. I can't boot up on them because I don't have there original computers anymore, and when I try on another computer they just blue screen and restart at the windows logo.
What I need is a software that I can boot from and will allow me to copy the stuff I want to a USB drive. Is there any software such as that available? Preferably free.
Thanks!
There are kits with USB to IDE adapters that aren't too costly. You could get most things out of the drives by connecting them to another system that way.
^agreed
I have had great success with Linux, GParted, gpart, and command-line copying. If you make a bootable USB/CD/DVD and boot from that, you can have all your drives plugged in and copy from the old ones to wherever you'll be storing the files (network, USB drive, another HDD/SSD, etc.).
Easiest method:
1 Download/install LiLi on your current Windows machine. http://www.linuxliveusb.com/
2 Download the newest Ubuntu .iso file and use LiLi to write it to a USB drive.
3 Reboot and use the BIOS/UEFI menu to boot from the new USB drive.
4 Choose Try Ubuntu without installing or close out of the installer if it pops up. This will put you in desktop mode.
5 Open the Dash and search for GParted and launch it. Also search for and launch the Ubuntu Software Center.
6 In the software Center, look for gpart and install it (this is all in RAM, your hard drives are all safe).
7 In GParted, check for the drive you want and try to recover partitions. It should be able to figure them out if you give the program time. The file window that opens may give some error and show nothing, but you can usually use the cp (copy) command recursively (type "man cp" or "cp --help" for more info) to get all your files from the recovered partition to your backup location.
I suggest only trying to recover the files you need and using a more robust data recover program like ddrecover if this method is insufficient.