re: Retrieving pictures from damaged laptop

You can buy a usb adaptor for the hard drive to hook it up to a different computer. You would likely need a sata to usb one. They are pretty inexpensive, $30 or so. If you hear any clicking noises, the drive is toast and you would need to have a data recovery company retrieve the data. We're a Drivesavers partner. Expensive but the best in the industry.

The other thing you can try to do is boot to a usb flash drive with Linux on it and see if Linux sees the other hard drive.