for example my friends hard drive doesnt work anymore it had a bad virus and i want to get like files off of it for him or somthing. But i want to know these steps just in case it happens in the future ya know. So i want to know what to do to get stuff off a hard drive once it goes bad
I have one and it works great. It supports SATA and IDE so. Just hook up the bad drive (given the drive can still read/write) to a good computer and copy over files.
If it's just a virus, then no real special software is needed. You can just plug the drive into another computer, scan the drive for viruses and copy things over.