So back to the "IT" portion of the post. With the hard drive clicking I figured just throw in a new one and reinstall windows. But then I remembered all the pictures and files she had stored on the old one and I panicked. I've never really been good at retrieving old files from deceased drives but I figured I'd give it a try. After doing some extensive searching I found a few pieces of software that claimed they would work, but cost money. So I tuned to trusty (sometimes) Download.com, placed my search for ONLY free software and found a true winner: MiniTool Data Power Recovery.
The MiniTool Data Power Recovery worked amazingly well and is free for home use. If you want to use the software in a business environment they ask they you purchase the license, luckily that wasn't the case for me but I can sure see how this would be very usual at my job and for many others I'm sure as well. Being that I didn't have a IDE to USB convertor at home I had to take the long route and slave the drive onto an old Sony Viao I have in the basement. Once everything was hooked up correctly and the MiniTool software installed, I just selected the "Corrupt Partition" option, let the software search the drive and BOOM there were all of my aunt's files. Transfering to the old Viao's hard drive took some time but other then that the software worked great, especially considering it was free! I would recommend the software to anyone who is in desperate need of restoring files from their old hard drives. Had I known about this software a few years ago I would have some myself a huge headache but now I'm glad I did my research and found something I can trust.
You can download the free verison of MiniTool Data Power Recovery at http://www.powerdatarecovery.com/download.html
