PC dead - help?

[Gary Whitta]

Okay, so my work PC has finally died after a few months of looking increasingly like it would do so (weird hard drive stuttering, lockups, etc). As of today, every time I try to boot it up I get a black screen with "Disc read error - press CTRL-ALT-DEL" - when I do this, it tries to reboot but goes straight back to that same screen. A neverending cycle of death.

Now that this has finally happened I am buying a Mac and will be working exclusively on that from now on. I already backed up my super-critical files a while back, but there's still some stuff I'd like to get off my dead PC. Is there any way to get this thing back up and running (safe mode, whatever) to get some last files of this thing before I finally throw it in the trash?

[Balasarius]

This is probably the easiest solution - http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/download/

[Ergo]

Yeah, Bart PE is a lifesaver. I use it almost every day.

[Marcus]

Yeah, Bart PE is a lifesaver. I use it almost every day.

While I dont use it every day I have used it more then a few times and its really amazing. Its a very very handy tool.

[Bill Dungsroman]

Delete all the porn NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Gary Whitta]

Well I took it into the repair shop and they said the hard drive was totally dead, non-recoverable. I'm surprised that it was that catastrophic a failure. Is it worth getting a second opinion?

[Mark Crump]

Do you know what they did to test it? If you have a spare PC, you could always shove the drive in that to rule out a controller failure.

[Fugitive]

It's possible that the platters are fine but the onboard controller is fried, and you could swap the controller board with a working one. It's rather impractical to do yourself though, so you could have one of those data recovery places try it for you, but it'll cost you.

If you don't really need the data on it, then it'll be cheaper to just replace it entirely.