I am looking for a way to transfer files from old computer no longer bootable to an external hard drive...?

i had the same thing happen recently. i'm good with computer applications but not with hardware so i didn't want to mess with it myself and risk losing my important documents. i called one of the big stores and they gave me a huge price as well, my solution was to call around to local computer repair/sales shops, i ended up finding someone who could do it for $55.. even if they're a little out of town it might be worth it. then sell your fried laptop for parts! they sell better than you'd think.

Take out the hard drive & buy a hard drive to USB cable adapter which you can used to connect to your working PC. The hard drive you remove from the old one does not have to be connected "internally" to the working one with the adapter. Or, you can add the harddrive as a second drive, if you have room in the working PC. You won't be able to boot to it, but you can at least see it as a drive & will be able to browse it just as you would a thumb drive or floopy diskette. This is what I have done with one of my old drives (added it as an extra drive internally). I also have an adapter so I can use it to rescue files off of crapped hard-drives. http://insidecomputer.stores.yahoo.net/usb20235hadr.html

It's pretty simple, really. Install it in your new computer as a second drive. Now you can copy the files to your external drive or anywhere else you want to. Once that's done, I suggest you then reformat the old drive, just to clean things up. Now you've got more storage on your new computer.

The only way I know of is to remove the old hard drive and put it on a dock, thermaltake actually makes one that you can plug an SATA hard drive into and it will automatically be detected on whatever computer you're using to connect it. Although, you can always install the old hard drive into a new computer in order to do this, but sometimes that's a little too much work.