Transfering files from hard drive to cd's

Hello All,
Please for give me for my stupidity but I need help and am not a geek just yet.

Q. I have been told my hp desktop was hit by lightning during hurricane charley ( that's another story) and is no longer functional. I have never backed up anything in my life and all my important docs like tax returns and business files are on the hard drive.

How can I get my saved files and information off this hard drive?
And could you be specific in detail when answering?

Cheers
Billy

 

Bill, welcome to major geeks.
Not to get you paranoid or anything but expect the worst. It could be that your hard drive no longer functions as well. But, of course, I do not know this for a fact.

If the system itself won't work, then typcially what we do is put the hard drive in another machine as what we call a slave. Basically this means that the surrogate machine already has windows on it and your hard drive would appear as just another storage media with it's own drive letter.

At this point we would scan the drive to make sure there are no file system errors. All this provided the hard drive is functional. There is a procedure to do this but lets get the drive up first.

Start with finding another machine to place this drive in so that can be sure that it still works. No sense in going on if it's dead. In which case you'll have to bring it to a data restoration service.