My daughter's laptop died

[Onkel Neal]

I got her a Compaq about two years ago, this weekend she says it would not turn on. She didn't let me know until after the fact, but she bought a new one and took the old one to Best Buy. They said they could not fix it, and charged her $100 to get the old files off onto DVDs. Wow, if the fault was with the PSU or some component other than the HD, why couldn't I take out the HD and hook it up to my other laptop? I know desktops have connections for multiple HD, do laptops?

[Onkel Neal]

Looks like HP is covering this issue (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&docname=c01087277)

[Monica Lewinsky]

You could get this for $30 vs. a $100 phone call and have other uses for it. I use mine for work and backup shared folders on my Windows Home Server to hard drives that came out of "junked" PCs that I remove hard drives from:

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0288075

It has connectios for laptop hd's [2.5"] and [3.5"] desktop/tower hd's.

I use this gadget almost everyday on "fried" PCs/laptops. If you shop around at the stores [not online], you can get it around $21.99.

In the interest of data safety:

You turn the laptop upside down. You DON'T have the A/C power cord in. You REMOVE the battery. Get yourself a tiny Phillips screw driver and "guess" which compartment has the hard drive in it - usually on the left/right side or the front - depends on the manufacture.

Remove the hard drive [sometimes a real challenge] and connect it to the above. For a laptop [ONLY], you don't use ANY power adapter on a laptop 2.5" hard drive; desktops are a different story - they need power.

Plug it into a USB port and start copying/pasting.

This might save someone else the money/the headaches/the nightmare ?

[NeonSamurai]

If I recall your typical laptop only has one connection. 17" gaming laptops though often have two drives. The techs either attached it to a laptop hard drive rig and to a regular sized pc, or a full size rig if its a full size drive.

Good that its covered, guess you got yourself a laptop now (or another one anyhow) :)

Cute toy, though usb is slow as heck for any major file transferring (took me close to 24 hours to transfer 500gb). Also the advert makes it sound like you can use it on any drive (i was wondering about power though)