failed Hard Drive

Hey guys, I've been having this issue with my main drive for the past few years. Every hard drive I've connected to it has failed to some capacity. At first I started using this pc with a regular 7200 rpm hdd. After a month or two, it started stuttering, freezing, and the drive was constantly...

My girlfriends laptop drive failed, but the computer does still recognize the drive. She has some pictures and a few documents that she wants back, but not enough to send it off and pay for professional data recovery. My build dual boots with linux, and since I think I can see other drives with...