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I believe your mum's hard drive has failed. There are two ways very different ways a hard drive can fail. One is a mechanical failure of the moving parts, usually the seek arm gets jammed and won't move (common when dropped). The other is when the information gets corrupted, usually bad sectors where info are stored loose their magnetism and when this happens in very important places like the FAT table then all references to the beginning of the files are lost.
There are programs out there that can recover data in the second case. None of them free that I know of but cheaper than taking it to a computer shop to have it done. But you need to be on a working computer to run the software and you have to have the damaged drive hooked up. So with a dock you could connect your mother's HD to your laptop and then you need the software.
I have used an older version of the recovery product from Stellar Phoenix that saved me years ago. What is nice about their software is that it will show you what it can recover so you know before you buy whether it will be worth it to you.
So if your uncle has a dock or a way to plug the old drive into his motherboard, or if you buy a dock, then you might use Stellar Phoenix and see if it can get the data for you.
I'm afraid nothing is guaranteed but may well be worth a few Quid to try a dock and then if the software can see the files it may be worth it to buy the software to extract them.
So check with your uncle and see if he already has a dock or something. Slim chance he has any HD recovery software (unless he ever had need of it himself in the past) but you can ask.
There are programs out there that can recover data in the second case. None of them free that I know of but cheaper than taking it to a computer shop to have it done. But you need to be on a working computer to run the software and you have to have the damaged drive hooked up. So with a dock you could connect your mother's HD to your laptop and then you need the software.
I have used an older version of the recovery product from Stellar Phoenix that saved me years ago. What is nice about their software is that it will show you what it can recover so you know before you buy whether it will be worth it to you.
So if your uncle has a dock or a way to plug the old drive into his motherboard, or if you buy a dock, then you might use Stellar Phoenix and see if it can get the data for you.
I'm afraid nothing is guaranteed but may well be worth a few Quid to try a dock and then if the software can see the files it may be worth it to buy the software to extract them.
So check with your uncle and see if he already has a dock or something. Slim chance he has any HD recovery software (unless he ever had need of it himself in the past) but you can ask.
