How to recover files from a crashed Hard Drive without and second hard drive?

[Trinalynn]

A friend's hard drive crashed and she asked me to try and retrieve some files from it. Can this be done without a second hard drive? No changes have been made to the drive right before the crash and nothing has been done since it crashed.

Is there a free ISO program/Software that I can use to do this?

[Lil_Boy_Blue]

Hi

Not a practical solution, because there may be more data than you would get onto a USB flash drive, and so the method to replace the Hard Disk and then attempt recovery is more usual.  A caddy for the old drive for instance.

If the drive will spin up and be readable then there are possibilities.

https://support.kaspersky.com/viruses/krd18

Boot-Repair also has advanced options to back up table partitions, back up bootsectors, create a Boot-Info (to get help by email or forum), or change the default repair parameters: configure GRUB, add kernel options (acpi=off ...), purge GRUB, change the default OS, restore a Windows-compatible MBR, repair a broken filesystem, specify the disk where GRUB should be installed, etc.

https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree

Obviously I am only guessing because a Hard Disk Crash can cover a Multitude of Sins.

Power on your PC, press Esc (repeatedly), then F2 at the prompt.
Choose System Tests (Fast Test does a 4 minute hardware check).
 

[tomsmith23]

There can be many possible reasons for hard drive crash such as

Overheating drive
Drive file system error
malware or virus attack

To recover data from crashed drive you can use data recovery software but before downloading any data recovery tool check whether the drive is recognized by system or not. Just go to the disk management window and look for the drive. If it is listed there then download data recovery tool on another drive of system and then run it for recovering data from the crasehed hard drive.