[michaelt]

A few times in the past I've taken a hard drive out of a failed computer and retrieved data from it on another computer. Sometimes this was cross-platform, reading Windows data on a Linux machine.

I haven't had to do this often, but the times I have had to do it, it's been a lifesaver.

Any advice, apart from keeping better backups so I don't have to do any cross-platform data recovery?

[kogepathic]

Pass the disk through to a VMWare/KVM/Xen container (if you can find another machine of the same processor architecture) and then boot the OS in the VM.

Usually it will piss Windows right off to be booted on completely different hardware, but usually it works enough to grab any files you may want from within the FDE.

It's utterly useless if the FDE was using any TPM hardware though, in that case then I'm afraid you're stuck using the original hardware.