I thought that’s what I was doing when I used that wizard thing to transfer the files to my external drive, but apparently I saved the files incorrectly, they are all .dat files and I can’t open them! :-(
This might be a stupid question. I mean no insult.
Have you tried using the file transfer wizard to get the files back off the hard drive?
You didn’t just try to get the files with explorer did you?
Some motherboards support multiple hard drives. If one hard drive is bootable you can connect the non-bootable hard drive and you may be able to recover the files directly. That’s what I did with my old PC, then the new drive eventually crashed, and I bought a lap-top (the old pc became obsolete anyhow) and I never got around to recovering the data from either of the the two old hard drives.