[DuncanWaring]

Assuming the hard drive itself is good, once you acquire a replacement, if it’s not a laptop and has room for a second hard drive, you should be able to take the old hard drive and hook it up as a “slave”, and then copy anything you want to from it to the “master” that’s the primary in the replacement computer.

Once that’s done, do a “wipe” (do a search on “disk wipe”, here’s one sample: http://www.cezeo.com/products/disk-redactor/ )on the old drive, then “beat the tar” out of it with a large hammer.

Or, you could just leave the “old” drive installed and point the Windows swap file at it, taking some of the load off the primary drive.

[Perdogg]

thanks!

[Proud_texan]

"you could just leave the “old” drive installed"

And also use it to backup the primary drive.

It took years but I have retired all my tape systems. I do backup to multiple external devices (USB and NAS) but I'm all disc backup media finally (old habits die hard).

[hiredhand]

Whatever you do, don't do anything "disruptive" to the hard drive in the dead computer. It's almost certainly recoverable. From the sounds of it, I'm going to guess that the PC's hardware suffered some sort of failure, possibly power supply related. There are several places now that offer a service whereby they will take the contents of a hard drive such as the one in your dead computer and copy it to DVD-ROM media. Staples is one such place, and possibly Office Max and Best Buy.

What DW said about the master/slave thing is true generally.