Sorry if this has been dicussed before, I could'nt seem to find anything on a search.
Basically I am trying to recover some pics from an old COMPUTER that wont power up. The fan(I think) had been running loud on my 7 year old computer for awhile and it finally died a few nights ago. After unplugging it and replugging it back in it fired up again and I CONTINUED to USE it the rest of the night and a few hours the next morning. After doing some reading I decided to open it up to clean and lube the fans. After opening it up I fired it up to see which fan was the culprit. It fired up for a split second and died. I saw a little spark come from the mother board and now it is dead for good. Not wanting to spen $90 for a diag. from the computer store I thought I'd pay them $65 to install my old drive in my other newer computer, but I dont think I have to room to install it internaly. All I realy want to do is get some pics I have in "my pics". Can this be done and how? What are my options? Thanks for any help.Well, you could buy an external enclosure for a 3.5" hard drive (HD) and put your old hard drive in it. Thus, you would have an external hard drive that would connect to your new computer via USB port.

If the old HD is large enough in CAPACITY to be worth using for backup purposes, you'd have a good backup device. If the old HD is small, buying an external enclosure for it may not be worth the money.

ANOTHER way to just get some files off the old HD would be to simply connect it to the new computer in a temporary fashion; it does not need to fully installed, i.e. mounted, in the new computer just to retrieve some files from it. All that's needed is to connect the data cable and power cord to it in the new computer.