Computer died after recovering files

[Casmom]

Ran recurs portable on a very old windows laptop.  Circa 2002 I think. Frankly I was surprised it even fired up at all. Recuva found files, and I restored them to a thumb drive. With both recuva portable and the thumb drive still attached, the laptop died. It now won't start up. It says there's a disk issue. I can get it to prompt me to go through a restore to factory settings, but it won't fire up as is.  So, is there ANY chance that running recurs did this. I'm assuming it's a coincidence, or perhaps a result of overtaxing t he poor old girl by doing the recovery, but is there any chance at all that recurs itself killed her.  I ask because I have another laptop to recover also, and on that one I can't take that chance. The other one is probably circa 2011 or so.  I need to still try a deep scan on the 2002 one (which I know I can do by removing the hard drive from the laptop and connecting to another computer as an external drive) and I need to recover the 2011 laptop too. Is there any reason to fear using the Recuva portable on that one now?  thanks!. 

[nukecad]

I suspect it's more to do with the drive being sat around unused for a number of years.

Maybe removing the drive and leaving it in a warm room for a week or so to make sure there is no condensation or the like in there may be the way to go?

I have an old desktop with Windows98 on it, It's got a very expensive CAD programme on there which I still use now and again.
I boot it up once a month or so just to warm things through and give the disk a spin