There's a special connector that allows you to plug in a laptop harddrive into a standard IDE cable in a PC.

If you can find someone with a PC and the cable, or if you can bring it to me, you/I might be able to slave the HDD and possibly retrieve data.

Otherwise, not even large corporations for the most part get data recovery. It costs $$$$

Oh.. just read that it doesn't spin up... Did you drop the laptop recently or anything? HDD's usually DO give warning signs. People who get HDD failure tend to get plenty of error messages and performance issues right up until the point of failure.

Did your laptop Blue Screen often or anything?

 

I had Mcaffee Virus scan and firewall updated very often and i ran ad-aware almost daily along with spysweeper.

 

It blue screened a few times, but far less then other computers i have had.

I have never dropped it or anything, it just sets on my desk. I went on vocation, came back, turned it on.. .and it broke. Its possible that my roomates did something and dont want to tell me, but i guess there is no way to know.

 

This is your best bet, if the drive spins up. If you're not computer savvy, just because the laptop doesn't detect the drive anymore doesn't automatically mean it doesn't spin up. Windows 2000 and XP also have the ability to attempt to read a hard drive even if the BIOS refuses to read it. After its hooked up as a slave hard drive to a normal PC, go under the System Properties, then Device Manager, and have the Device Manager look for new hardware. If the drive was able to spin up at all, it should detect it and at least try to read it.

However, data recovery places have gotten a lot cheaper lately. My cousin recently lost his hard drive, and didn't backup and he was able to have a company attempt to recover his data on a per file basis. I forget the cost of each file, but it wasn't outrageous. This wasn't for a clean room or anything, just data recovery.

So as a last resort you could use data recovery.

If you don't want to use data recovery and would like to try something ... Here's a possibility. It sounds crazy but makes sense. Old hard drives that are on all the time and get spun down suddenly will sometimes get "locked", that is they can no longer spin properly. I read a story once where a data center accidently lost power and all of their servers shut off. A pretty good amount of their disks did not come back up because they had locked, so they resorted to taking the disks out and dropping them (from a reasonable distance) onto the floor to loosen the spinning mechanism. Surprisingly a good number of the bad disks were operational after that point. This is definitely a last resort option though and if you want to go the data recovery route, I'd do that instead of trying to drop disks on the floor

I don't remember exactly what company he used, but here's one you might try for a price quote... http://www.iomegadatarecovery.com/

 

I fully recommend slaving into another computer. You already have another hard drive, so now all you need is the data off the old one. No need to try putting it back into your laptop.

Just becuase the computer couldnt recognize the drive doesnt mean it went bad. Sometimes you can pick up a virus or spyware and it can mess with the system BIOS. If it jacks up the BIOS enough then the computer will just crap out and not even attempt to load (I've seen it before).

I wouldn't mind trying to slave into my comp, but Norfolk is a fair drive and i dont have the connector. I was also going to say maybe take 93preludeh22 up on the offer, but looks like he is just right around the corner from me.

See if someone down there, or one of your roommates, would let you slave the disk into their computer. You can hit F2 during boot up to get into the BIOS. Once there change the Primary Slave recognition to [Auto] and boot up. Then see if the drive is recognized in My Computer. If so just transfer the files to the other HD and burn them onto disk.

Hope that makes sense. Good Luck!

 

Also, you need to set your laptop hard drive to slave (this might be on the connection converter instead of the laptop itself, I'm not very familiar with 2.5" disks).

The PC you're connecting it to may also need to change its hard drive jumpers to "Master" or "Master with slave present" instead of "Single" or "Master" depending on the drive. Or if you're connecting to a reasonably new computer with a Ultra 66 or greater IDE cable (the finer cable with more wires than a standard IDE cable, usually has 2 or 3 different colors on the connectors, blue and black are popular), then all the disks should be jumpered to Cable Select.

If all of this makes absolutely no sense, then hopefully the person helping you out to hook up the disk will know what I mean. I'd also offer to help, but Norfolk isn't much closer to me than it is to the guys in Maryland, and I don't have the converter for a 2.5" IDE to a 3.5". Hopefully someone down your way can help out.

I'd also like to add that while BIOS viruses are real and possible, they're pretty rare and often will only work with certain types of computers. Its always possible your BIOS "forgot" about your drive and you need to set it back up, but if you already put in a new disk into your laptop, I'm assuming you already tried this or your BIOS is set to auto detect. But more than likely disk failure or some sort of setup problem is the cause here.

 

 

what exactly do these converters look like to make it a slave drive on a desktop? I have seen boxes that you can put a laptop harddrive in and connect to a computer, is that what you mean? If so, could i do that and hook it up to my laptop? I suppose i can always buy one and take it back.

 

Here's a few examples I found:

http://www.mp3car.com/store/product_...products_id=35
http://sewelldirect.com/25to35ideconverter.asp
http://www.logicsupply.com/product_i...roducts_id/165
http://www.pebio.com/ide-converter.html

I don't know how reliable any of these companies are, so you may want to goto www.resellerratings.com and search for them or try to find another company. I tried looking on newegg but I couldn't find the converter there.