Help with Access to Old Hard Drive

Yes, this is what I do regularly. I really like linux's disk handling. I'd use any of the linux "rescue" disks that are out there. They have all the utilities required on the disk. http://ubuntu-rescue-remix.org/ One utility in particular is called "ddrescue" and will let you image partially broken hard drives in an intelligent manner. You image the drive first, and then do all of your "work" off of the image. You can mount the drive directly read-only like Chuck said, but if it's an older drive, the data is very valuable, or if there's damage suspected, then do yourself a favor and image the whole thing first. Then you can mount the image, just as if it's a regular hard drive, and then do your work from that. You can then send the stuff via large USB stick, FTP, or so on to another Windows machine, if that's the plan. Good reading here too https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DataRecovery Hope this helps. Keith