Need help, please. my old desktop blew up.

[Derek]

Im using a laptop. i was able to backup my music and some pics and notes. But theres 2 problems:
1) Now i do have some things and my old desktop harddrive that i don't anyone else to see. The power supply of the desk top computer is dead, but the harddrive may still be intact. the most important worry is making sure noone sees or reads those files i have on the harddrive, theyre private. Is there a way i can delete those files from the harddive where noone can see them? Or do you think its a high possability that the harddrive is gone too and i'm safe?
2) I'm trying to relogin to some of the messageboards and photobucket. I cant remember my password so i requested an email reminder, of course i only had an option to change my password, not to be reminded of my old one. So i changed it, tried to login with the new password...don't work, tried again..don't work. I can't email, because itll ask me what my email IP adress is and i don't know it nor do i know how to find out.
Could someone please help me out here?!?

[Little Child]

Hey Derek....

I'm not a real expert but this is what I've found you should never do when your computer dies..... NEVER assume all the data is lost unless you've personally REFORMATTED the drive because it just might not be. Even erased data can be recovered. Trust me... I've done it with my own computer.. you just need the right program to do it with.

To answer your first question:

If you are willing to spend just a little bit of money, you can get a portable docking station for internal hard drives. You can remove your drive from the computer and insert it into the slot of the docking station meant for the that size drive and treat it like an external drive. They have a USB or other hook up so that it links to your new computer and you can share, move, delete (or whatever you wish) or edit the files on the old drive. If the drive itself is truly kaput and you can't access it at all thru those means, I'd suggest smashing that drive to as many tiny bits as you can if you don't want anyone to gain access to the files on it.

And your second question:

I've never heard of a security measure wanting you to verify your IP address but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. I would try resetting the password once again and if that does not work I'd contact the administrator of the site you need to access and see if their security measures can be bypassed or if they can reset your password themselves to something generic until you can personally change it to something you will easily remember.