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Take the disk out, put it in a usb type external caddy or similar. These are available for IDE and Sata.
Plug the drive into another pc/laptop. As the drive is not a boot drive it is fairly safe just make sure your av is up to date. Recover the pictures and then nuke the drive.
http://www.ebuyer.com/454202-dynamode-usb-2-0-powered-external-housing-for-3-5-inch-ide-hdd-silver-usb-hd3-5-ahttp://www.ebuyer.com/482881-xenta-3-5-usb3-0-sata-hdd-enclosure-silver-and-black-gd3561213
freezing77
mespilus
Anybody feeling charitable?
A mate died about a year ago, and his widow has asked me to retrieve any photos,
(not those sort, my mate was a diver and was slowly digitising his collection of underwater slr photos. he had one of those cool underwater housings for his Canon),
remove any trace of/connection to him, and offer as a donation.
So happens son has a friend in a family of four children, absent father, no pcs currently, so looked like I could do a couple of favours at the same time.
My mate came from a time when drivers were not automatically updated by Windows,
so his Dell Studio, (originally W7, now 8.1), would sometimes suffer from him being suckered into downloading some spurious 'Driver Update' package. A few times I cleared out his previous laptop, and having spent a few hours with this one, I can see why the last windows update was August 2014 and his wife retains the Dell he bought himself in September 2014.
He tried to use Firefox, but ended up being suckered into installing various 'toolbars',
'Delta', 'Movies toolbar for Firefox', 'Movies toolbar for Internet Explorer', and Firefox was anchored on version 24, which had hijacked his downloads in the past.
CCleaner allowed me to remove the above, plus, 'Driver Restore','Driver Update', 'Fix Cleaner', 'MyFree Codec','iLivid','Yahoo software Update'.
'Snap.do' seemed persistent,
and when I installed the latest Firefox from a (disposable) usb stick,
it looked like there were two versions of Firefox running with a 'bad' version superimposed over the good one, with the screen flicking between them until the 'diseased' version won out.
Also he had had problems installing a new Canon printer and the software for at least two dive computers. There is surprisingly little Dell bloatware,
and,
the trackpad is not behaving like a trackpad.
Left clicking brings up a context menu, so does the right click. Depending upon the window you are trying to access, 'Esc' will remove the left click context menu, but attempting to click won't register. A quick check of device manager showed no sign of a trackpad, and 'Windows mouse management console' or some such 'is not installed'.
Also the first letter of any search in the 2nd or subsequent firefox tab will be lost, bit the speaker will beep.
Malwarebytes ran for 90 minutes found 45 threats and the heuristic search topped out at 2270 issues. All deleted. I was unable to find a suitable driver on the Dell website, even after downloading the 'Auto-detect' function, it told me the laptop was a W7 device, not the 8.1 that it is running.
Oh it also downloaded 227MB of Windows updates overnight, and another 40MB this morning,
but still not really usable.
In hope I allowed it to download & install W10, hoping that this fresh install would override all the track/touchpad problems.
4.5 hours later the laptop is running, but the trackpad is the same.
I suspect i am encountering user/adminstrator problems.
(I had to use the Microsoft, 'we'll send you a text or message' to reset the unknow password last night), as now in W10, Device Manager shows no detail,
clicking say on 'Ide ata/atapi controller' gives just the options of 'Scan for hardware changes or Properties'. If 'Properties' is selected the resultant window has none of the expected tabs.
Thanks for reading.
Nuke it from orbit?