Bob Kolenberg wrote;
>There was a spyware problem I was trying to tackle prior to the event, with
>pop-ups occuring without an internet connection.

The occurrence of pop ups are frustrating to say the least and if your drive
were still operational, meaning you could still boot into windows with it
you could try a malware removal utility that Microsoft has.
http://www.microsoft.com/security/malwareremove/default.mspx#run

Hopefully the link will take you there and you can download the utility and
possible run it on your drive.

> My question is what steps should I follow to safely retrieve the stored
>pictures, documents, and information from the crashed HD to my new PC.

When you say "crashed HD" what are you referring to? Can you get into the
BIOS and see the drive? Can you hear the drive spin up or has it just
stopped altogether and become toast? What steps did you try in order to get
rid of the pop ups that led to the "fatal event of unknown cause"?

Knowing what you did would be helpful in being able to advise you.

There is no definitive answer for this issue. There are a couple of
commercially available utilities that may help diagnose and possible correct
the problem such as SpinRite. http://grc.com/default.htm  There may be some
freeware utilities out there however I'm not aware of any.

You stated that you have an 80gig drive partitioned into two 40gig segments.
Are your pictures on the partition that did not crash? Can you access this
area? If this is possible, you can hook the drive up as a secondary drive
and pull the pictures to the new drive and then back them up on a CD for
future use. You can also format that drive and use it as a backup drive for
storage.

> with pop-ups occuring without an internet connection.

When you finally get this issue resolved my suggestion would be install a
spy ware program, http://www.lavasoft.de/ and a firewall program.
http://www.zonelabs.com/store/content/home.jsp

There are too many bad web sites out there and some of them will track
you're every move.

Sincerely,

Frank Suszka
netTek Computers
[log in to unmask]






  _____

avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com> : Outbound message clean.


Virus Database (VPS): 0526-4, 07/01/2005
Tested on: 7/3/2005 11:36:43 AM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2005 ALWIL Software.

        The NOSPIN Group has added a new feature on our website,
           web based bulletinboard for questions and answers:
              Visit our sister website at http://nospin.com