Hi All:

Dell support has confirmed my worse fears--the registry error I had meant that my hard drive is dead. As I go to install the replacement drive, is there a way I can connect or access the hard drive through another computer (boot as a secondary drive) and access the data?

Thanks.

hi, if it a desktop computer ,and the drive is accessible [some are not when they die .]you can remove it and install the new on ,install window and then slave the old drive to it, or , you should be able to slave it on any computer .if its a laptop ,then different story ,you would need a usb device of sorts to hook it up

Like the previous poster suggested. You can slave the HDD. You can also pick up an external enclosure which essentially turns you old HDD into an external HDD. You can get these in desktop size and laptop size and ATA or SATA. If the drive will not read by conventional methods like slaving or external you can use a program called acronis disk director. I have had alot of success with corrupted partition tables and file systems being able to copy the data from the drive with this program. You can also try data recovery software such as file scavenger or such...many to choose from.

Lastly and hopefully doesn't come to this point but you can send for recovery services which are very expensive....somewhere between 250 for level 1 to 1500 for level 3 recovery.