harddrive recovery when monitor is bad

my dell inspiron 8600 has a bad monitor and perhaps other motherboard issues, however I am able to turn the system on. Is there a way to recover the data from the harddrive in this condition? and if so, how does it get done?
Than you.

 

As long as your hard drive is not itself damaged, you're fine. You can just move the hard drive into a working computer and access it from there, or you can repair your current system without losing any data off the drive. If you do make major hardware changes on the system your hard drive is in now (i.e., replacing the motherboard), and you are running windows, you will need to install your operating system onto a separate hard drive than the one you have currently, and boot from that drive. You can still access the hard drive you have your other data on this way, you will just not be booting from that drive (a prior installation of windows won't load once you've made significant changes to hardware, and you would have to format and lose the data on your current drive in order to make it a bootable drive on a new hardware configuration).

A bad monitor shouldn't have you worried about your hdd. It's a simple fix... plug in a working monitor. You said your computer turns on. If, when you have a working monitor plugged in, your system boots and loads windows properly, you're probably not looking at any motherboard issues. If it turns on but does not boot, then you've got a suspect mobo.

edit: Apologies, I see after I've posted you're talking about a laptop. So ya, as plodr says, an external monitor would let you work around a bad monitor. Also everything else he mentioned that I didn't think of!

 

If it is just the display and not the video chip, you can attach an external monitor so you can see what you are doing.
There are several ways to recover data. Attach an external hd and move what you want over. Attach a USB thumb drive and move the files. Burn the files to a data CD or DVD. Remove the hd from the computer and attach it to another computer to get the file.

You need to supply quite a bit more information so we know exactly what you have access to and how bad the Inspiron 8600 is in terms of windows loading.