Noob question / HDD file recovery

[InsufficientSleep]

A friend of mine have a broken laptop with a lot of pictures and video files on it.

What he told me is that the laptop have been laying in his bag being knocked around and stuff,  when he tries to start the laptop it goes to windows recovery but it can't fix the problem and shuts it down again.

The pictures and video files are from his two tours in Afghanistan and means a lot to him.  Can I just hook his hdd up to my computer and use a software to get his stuff over to my computer?

The store where he bought it a few year ago didn't want to try so he came to me with it since I fixed his last computer.  

I told him I wasn't sure and I don't want to be the one telling him " woops " I lost his files.  I also told him to stop trying to boot the pc and wait for me to come back to him. 

Pro. recovery services are expensive here in Norway. 

[kb5zue]

Take the drive out of his machine and put it in your machine as a secondary drive.  Hopefully you will be able to just copy his files (pics and docs) from his drive to yours without too much difficulty.  After you get all his files off of it, then you can put it back in his machine and reinstall windows with a clean, fresh install and all will be good.

[Gikero]

Create an image of the hard drive before trying anything. There is a lot of software out there for this. If I was in your situation, I'd get an image and then run something like FAB's Autobackup Pro on the drive while it is connected to a separate PC. I do this exact process daily. Fab's is $45 Euros. If you need a free imaging application, Clonezilla or Aomei Backupper Standard are both good choices.

[InsufficientSleep]

thank's. I'll look into those imaging applications.  

 

[InsufficientSleep]

So should I mirror or clone the HDD before starting on anything,  I'm pretty blank on this field .

When I moved from hdd to ssd I used cloning,  Is mirroring / imaging the same but faster ?