Urgent! Need answer fast! Friend's Thesis at stake!

Hey guys. My floor's peer leader's laptop, a 3.5 year old Dell, just died. He did not backup any of his files. He can't access them because the laptop won't turn on at all. The power lights turn on and then turn off immediately. He did not spill anything on it.

Can I take out his laptop hard drive and put it into a 3.5 inch external enclosure?

His thesis is due this friday!

 

It's more than likely a 2.5" drive (I doubt its a 1.8"). You should be able to switch the drive out to another notebook though. Good luck.

 

I have done this , but with NTFS some things will be hard to access
I put them in USB drive cases,
if he had the xp? installed as fat32 you should be able to get most everything off it

 

3.5 years old, guessing its a PATA 2.5" Notebook Hard drive.

Which means you need a 2.5" Notebook Hard drive adapter/enclosure as the data and power connectors are merged. Where as a 3.5" PATA Hard Drive has a 40-pin data connector and a 4-pin Molex Power connector, a 2.5" PATA hard drive has, as I said, a 44-pin data/power connector.

Also, a lot of manufacturers (if not all) put a connector over it, to change it from a pin based connector to a sort of slot based connector. You can remove that, just be careful as its easy to bend the pins when removing. This is to assume the enclosure/adapter you buy doesn't have the corresponding interface.

This is all to get access to the disk.... assuming the hard drive is functioning correctly you should not have any issues accessing the file system. If its NTFS based (Windows XP/Windows 2000) you should have full rights to the disk, assuming you're logged in as an Administrator on the host system. Good luck.

PS If its FAT based File system, which is the only other file system 99.999999999999% of all Windows-Based OSes used then its even easier to access it.

 

just to reiterate what others have said.....you cannot put it into a 3.25" external enclosure b/c it will have a 2.5" hd. you may be able to put it into another laptop, but it must have the same type of interface, i.e. ata, pata, sata....

 

Its not turning on, mainly because a piece of hardware has failed.
Things to check:
Find bios battery, see if it still holds power.
Unplug any accessories and ac adaptor.
Try powering up on battery.
Take the laptop apart, if you are tech savvy, if not have someone who is, take it apart and reseat the graphics card, memory and such.

Check to see that no loose metal or screws are inside the laptop.
Check to see if anything has burned out.

Also remove all memory from the system. Try one card at a time to see if the issue is memory related.

I had a similar problem on my Voodoo, and the fix was related to an unseated graphics card.

Good Luck

K-TRON

 

I use a 2.5 external enclosure go buy a external drive they have laptop drives in the small ones, I just pull it and put the drive Im recovering data from

 

You would be looking at a 2.5" HDD from the laptop, mostly IDE..., so you can get a IDE based enclosure and get it workin through the USB interface....

btw, there's nothing called 3.25"..., there are 2.5", 3.5" and 5.25"...

 

Thanks guys. Well, I found out that one of his other friends had the same laptop as him. They were able to swap hard drives and move the data over to a thumb drive for now.

Now I need to go beat my peer leader silly and show him the importance of having at least 2 copies of his documents. Also going to help him find a new laptop to buy.

Thanks again guys.