Hardrive not doing anything

[Vendetta]

So last monday I get home from school and start up my laptop and everything seemed fine at this point.  I get to the login screen, type my password, then nothing happens.  I wait for about 10 minutes and still nothing happens.  I decide to force shut down and restart it.  I get my startup screen, but after that, I get a completely black screen except for a flashing cursor at the top left of my screen, and thats all thats going on.  It doesn't load or anything.  I force shutdown and restart one or two more times, but I still get the same thing.

I had only assumed that the hardrive just had had enough and decided to crash on me.  I went and put in my Windows 7 disk to see if I could recover, but after a few attempts, I get the 'Cannot locate C drive' crap.  So I went and put in a new hardrive (which was fun).  Started up and cleared the hardrive (my brother used it for Linux, but he doesn't need it anymore) and put Windows 7 Enterprise in.  Started up just fine and installation went smoothly.  Got Steam, Itunes and all the what-nots.


Now, I made you read all that to ask you my question.  The ruined hardrive has some things that were important to me.  I'm asking how can I get my data off the ruined hardrive onto a USP, or something I can store it in, and take the USP to my new hardrive, as the ruined hardrive won't respond in any computer in my house.  I get the same thing as what I got on my laptop, a black screen with a flashing cursor in the top left corner.

Thanks in advance!

[Jedikiller]

Have you tried putting it in a computer as a non-boot disk? Or perhaps a Linux system as an addon disk?

[Vendetta]

No.  I have a portable Hardrive I put music and movies on and take it to friends house to listen to music, etc. and it goes into a USP.  I could pull that one out and put the bad one in, but I'm not entirely sure what would come up if anything.  I'll try later.  Little busy right now.

[TarnishedWit]

Was there any way you could boot the old hard drive in safe mode and try to recover files that way?

[Soap Mactavish]

what is USP short for again?

[Vendetta]

He means USB. Universal Serial Bus-this what the port is called. A USP is a gun. And specifically he means a USB thumb drive-there are thousands of different USB devices out there from USB sound cards to USB fans-it's incorrect to call a USB thumb drive simply 'a USB' as USB is simply the interface between the device and the computer and not the storage device/object itself.

I knew that

I knew it didn't sound right 

Try this: Put the harddrive in an existing computer but DO NOT use it as a boot device-just hook it up as a second drive. Boot into windows and see if it will recognize the drive. If it doesn't you'll have to use a dedicated recovery utility such as (my favorite) GetDataBack or some other recovery utility.

Will try out sometime this weekend.  The data isn't that vital to me.  At the most I lost was some school papers.  I doesn't matter too much if I get everything back, I was just wondering what I could do to get the data back if I did need something back.

[Jedikiller]

Use Dropbox to store all your school papers and important stuff. Then they will be protected forever. If you sign up with this link we both get extra space free! https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTM2ODk3MDg5?src=global0

As for getting the data back, if what Red posted doesn't work, there's probably a company wherever you live that could do it for you if it's really important.

[Soap Mactavish]

i find skydrive to be much more MS office friendly

http://explore.live.com/windows-live-skydrive