System is toast - need data off hard drives

[Taz]

I think my system has finally died. I've tried for two hours to boot it but it refuses to boot. Ironically I wanted to boot it to back up all my important data! I'm using my work laptop at the moment.

Now, I have two WD Raptor hard drives. Almost all of my important data is on the second drive. However, the first drive contains my outlook folders file. I don't want to lose this either. The hard drives are fine. It was just the motherboard that has given up the ghost.

I will be building a new system at the weekend. I'm probably going to have to order a new hard drive to install the new OS on, and use the two WD Raptors from the old system as D: and E: drives. So, if I order a brand new drive for the new system, would I be able to connect my old drives and read them? They are old SATA WD Raptors formatted using NTFS (my old OS was XP Home). The new OS will be Vista 64. I just want to be able to read the data off them (there's around 3-4GB of very important data) and then clean them up and use them for backups, storing installers, etc.

[charleski]

It depends on whether the reason your old system won't boot is because the HD is dead (which is possible).

I would connect the drives one at a time, starting with the old data drive. The important thing is not to write anything to the drive that you are trying to recover. The first test is getting the drive to mount, which is half the battle. Copy over the files you need to recover to the new HD twice, and compare them to make sure they're identical and you haven't run into read errors (which will probably produce random errors in the damaged sectors). If that doesn't work, then you need more specialised tools.

[Taz]

Lo and behold the system has just booted up! My bacon may be saved yet! If it fails midway through I will plug them into the new system as drives D: and E: and just copy the data over to the new system drive.

The system is failing with a 'CPU failure' message. I think a solder joint is faulty or a track is broken on the motherboard.