I'm not sure what you mean by dead but you may be looking for something different.
Recuva is for restoring deleted files or if you format your hard drive/partition then it will aid in restoring files.
You may just need to purchase one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16812270111
Take the hard drive out, hook it up to another computer with this device through USB and see if you can find the files.
If the hard drive is dead and wont spin up nothing is going to help you, sorry.
If the virus you suspect has deleted files or stopped the hard drive from booting your OS then yes Recuva will work but you need to run it on a working computer with the hard drive attached to it in some way.
If this is a hard drive that did not have a bootable partition and was used for storage then just install this program, scan for the files and you will see the results when its finished scanning. You can then choose to restore the files to a separate drive/partition.
Just follow the Step by Step wizard which is really easy.
Good luck, hope this helps.
