Data recovery from a disc

My disc started to play up, I received the following communication:
IDE CHANNEL 0 SLAVE HARD DISK SMART STATUS BAD WARNING IMMEDIATE BACK UP YOUR DISK DRIVE A FAILURE MAY BE IMMINENT.
yes quite the failure was imminent that I was unable to do that which it said I should do! I heard the disk making all manner of clicking and clunking noises prior to its demise, it must have died a death as windows does not recognize it in my computer. I asked a friend who knows more than I do on the subject to take it out from my PC and install it into his so that he might be able to recover the data and then transcribe everything onto a USB external disk, but when he connected it to his PC(he is operating windows 7) the PC would not boot? Can anyone offer a solution please?:cry:cry:cry:cry:cry:cry:cry:cry

 

You can try using a USB adapter or enclosure and hook it to a healthy PC thru the USB port. If the PC recognizes it, there are MANY free tools which can help. If the PC does not recognize it, then your options are quite limited, and you may need to go with a commercial paid data recovery company. Not cheap. Here's some freeware data recovery tools:
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Ultimate_Data_Recovery_d5336.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Victoria_for_Windows_d5688.html
http://www.majorgeeks.com/Disk_Investigator_d1341.html
* http://www.majorgeeks.com/TestDisk_d4803.html *
* http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Saving_d5753.html *
* http://www.majorgeeks.com/Partition_Find_&_Mount_d5740.html *
http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm
.... and one over at Snapfiles http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/softperfect-file-recovery/spfilerecovery.html

* = these are primarily for 'rebuilding' or recovering an entire partition, at the partition level, versus recovery at the file level.

Many more programs can be found in the Major Geeks Data Recovery section and in the Drive Utilities section:
Data Recovery: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads38.html
Drive Utilities: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads8.html
. . . and you might even find some in the Back Up section: http://www.majorgeeks.com/downloads3.html

I haven't necessarily used all of the programs listed above, but I have used most of 'em, and they all have their own particular pluses and minuses. Good luck!

. . . I was just thinking . . . If you have another hard drive, you can install it in your PC as the main drive C:, install Windows to it, and try to access your dead drive as a slave drive -OR- you can plug a USB flash drive into your PC, boot to a live PECD (like the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows; it's free) or a live Linux CD (like Knoppix; it's free too) and try to copy the data over to the USB flash drive using one of the UBCD4Win built-in explorers or data recovery tools....

 

If the drive is so bad that it stops a PC from booting, there are really only two options I can think of - the freezer trick (it may allow the board to start and run the drive) or clean room techniques, the first is free, the second may be mega$.

 

Well thank you for this extensive and most informative of replies, I personally shall not attempt to do that which you have intimated, but have a technobod individual to whom I shall present my disk and hopefully she'll be able to recover my lost data doing all that which has been said by you, thank you once again.