Rescuing old HD from dead laptop?
 

Anybody have experience of this? My main machine died this weekend, which was no surprise as it was on the way out, so all the important stuff was backed up but there were a few pics I'd like to save if possible.

Anybody know the best way of doing this, just rip out the HD and put it in a caddy? (The HD is fine I think, the screen was what died...)

Cheers

should be no problem with an usb interface

How old?

If the drive is SATA then the data and power connectors are the same as a full sized 3 1/2" drive, so you can plug it straight into the mainboard and power supply. If it's IDE (older) then you'll need some sort of adapter.

^ The above assumes you have a desktop and more than one drive port of course... if your new machine is a laptop then you'll need an external enclosure

It's a SATA, only a coupe of years old. Thinking I'll get a usb caddy, but wondering if a machine I connect it to will recognise the drive partitions...

It should. It won't boot as an OS rather just a slave drive. Just explore it as you would in Windows Explorer and find the files you need. Then drag them over to your other HDD.

If the data is small enough to fit on a dvd or cd, hook the laptop up to a tv or another monitor....errr, you may actually have to tweak settings on the laptop to do that (nullifying that solution). Although, if you have HDMI out, it may work without having to configure it. Worth a try anyway. Also, if you have an esata port on the laptop and the tv route works, you could use a hard drive docking station (like 25 bucks) and transfer the info to another hard drive. (actually, usb will work with the docking station as well, so it depends on whether or not connecting to a tv works so you can see what you are doing).

(maybe I should have pressed the enter key somewhere in that mess of letters?)

Cool cheers for the advice guys...

I guess the other question is how the laptop died... are you sure it wasn't the drive that went kaput?

if only the screen is bad maybe you can plug in an external monitor long enough to grab the few pics you want to save

Yep, you can get a nice little external enclosure for it if yo uwant. It should work just fine. It should also be fairly easy to get to through the bottom of the chassis.

just get a big magnet and place it on top of the hard drive you want to get the info out of :winkwink: