extracting files from old hard drive

I need to extract my photos from an old corrupt internal hard drive using my own PC, Any ideas how I would go about it. If there are any videos anyone knows of online it would be great.
Thanks.

In what way is the disk corrupt?

Paddyjnr,
There are a few different things you could try depending on the state of the disk and how much you're willing to pay.

The most common form of corruption is where the file index is chewed-up but the rest of the file-system is fairly ok. The original files may still be present on the disk but as the index pointing to their location is gone they can't be easily read.

The files can be recovered on your own PC using dedicated software, but you will need to be comfortable opening up you PC and swapping the drive in & out.

You would need to do the following:
Find, download & install some file recovery software (I’ve used “Undelete All” before and it’s quite effective. http://undelete-all.com/)

Always “ground” yourself before working on the innards of a PC as static electricity can fry the chips, and make sure the PC is switched-off with the power-supply plugged out.

Change the corrupt hard disk to a slave drive (there will be jumper connections along the back of the drive), and you should be setting it to either slave or cable-select (CS). This will ensure that when you power up your pc it will still read from the main hard-disk and boot up to your operating system.
Plug in the dodgy drive by fitting the ribbon-cable and power to the back of the drive.

When you boot-up your PC you should be able to “see” the corrupt drive in Windows explorer but will probably get an error message if you try to access the files.

Run the recovery software, pointing it at the corrupt drive and specifying a location to recover the files to. You shouldn’t attempt to recover files onto the dodgy drive as it may over-write the files you are trying to recover.

If the above is to complicated you could try a commercial recovery solution:

The likes of PC World have a data-recovery service for which I think they charge around the €100 mark.
PCDoctor (http://www.pcdoctor.ie/) advertise data recovery / backup solutions but I’ve never used them so can’t comment on the cost.

If the corruption is particularly bad and the files are important, there are a number of dedicated recovery specialists you could use. I’ve used a company in the UK called Vogon (http://www.vogon-international.com/) for recovery of server-disks in work but they are very pricey and you could be running north of €500 very easily.

Ultimately it will be down to the state of the disk an how much you are willing to pay to recover the files.

Thank you 99charlie for all your time and ya your right it is a little complicating for me, that slave and master thingy always gets me confused.
Dearg Doom the computer is belonging to my father in-law and It was being used all along without anti virus and when I got him to put in avg and guided him over the phone.
It uncovered various viruses, and he proceeded to delete them I think, next thing I know he was getting the "blue screen of death" everywhere even in safe mode.
Any way since I've been talking to a friend who says he'll do it for me as much as he is sick to death of fixing computers at this stage.
He bought a Mac for the very reason so he says he no longer gets viruses.

All files should be recoverable in that case - it will be a case of mounting the drive and extracting the files. When that is done, the easiest thing to do will be to reformat the disk and reinstall Windows on your father-in-law's PC, but make sure you have all the re-installation disks you need.

The problem with blindly deleting infected files is that viruses can attach to operating system files so deleting the file can cause problems.

Hi All,
just to let you know that all the pics are recovered and windows re-installed again from scratch.
We had a few minor hiccups on the way, we connected the HD to his pc and located the pic files but they showed up as empty so we eventually got in and opened AVG restored the viruses from the vault, deactivated the resident shield (thus allowing windows to function "normally" again) and sent the pics to an external drive.
Thanks again folks for your time.