I know a hard drive is fried. I saw it smoke. Can I get the data off it?

You may be able to get at the data yourself. It depends on the kind of damage you have. If you have the original CDs that came with your computer, you can probably boot from one of them and run a diagnostic on the drive. You may be able to repair or bypass the damaged sectors and recover your system. If you have the setup CD for your OS, e.g., Windows XP, you can boot to that and see if it will let you repair your existing OS. To boot from a CD, you will need to go into your computer's BIOS setup and change the boot order. It's different on different computers, but you should be able to select your CD-ROM drive as the boot device.

If the drive's boot sector is damaged, which prevents your OS from being repaired or booting up, it may still be possible to recover the data by installing the disk as a slave drive on another computer. You can do this, either by using an open drive bay on the unaffected computer, or by putting the drive into a USB or FireWire enclosure made for external hard drives.

If you cannot recover the data this way, there are a number of services that will do this for you, but it isn't cheap. You can find them on line or in your local yellow pages. It involves opening the hard drive in a clean room, removing the platter, cleaning it, and installing the platter in an undamaged drive of the same type. Then the service will try to read the data from the drive using low-level disk utilites. This is definitely a job for the pros; you cannot do this yourself. If you are just trying to get back your email contacts or some family pictures, this may not be an option for you. But if you have vital information on the drive, it may be your only option.

How valuable is the data? One of the answers you got is what the professional data recovery experts use - rebuild into a good drive case. The donor drive has to be the EXACT SAME model/revision for this to work, and it is not a simple job. Take it to the experts.It will be expensive though - get a price first.

yep.. if it is truly burned out where it wont accept any type of power wire repairs and start up again..

you can take it apart and put the disk itself into another hard drive of the same type and reassemble the drive and boot it up, it should work fine as long as the disk itself was not majorly damaged

It depends upon where you live as to whether or not you can take it somewhere. You may have to ship it. Anyway, there are places that repair hard drives. Here's a sample from a search I did.

http://www.google.com/search?q=windows+7+home+prem...

Hard Drive Repair Clicking HardDrive Recovery Services

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yep sonds like it's toast there is a chance that if you had a clean room you mgth be able to get the data off but that wil be mega expensive

If it was smoking, the data's gone.