We have two laptops that have died recently (the motherboards). This was confirmed by techies who do this sort of stuff for a living. These same techies however didn't inform me of the above. It wasn't until my dh asked one of his clients about retrieving data off one of these laptops did this little bit of information come out. I was concerned that we wouldn't be able to see the data because the video portion of this laptop wasn't working. The screen would go black and not come back up. How in the world would we get the data? When I spoke with him I mentioned my concern. He said he could pull the harddrive out of the laptop and install it in a device he has that when connected to another computer it shows up as an external drive. We then could just copy the data we need from the device onto the new computer. Awesome!
But then I began thinking... if he can do this why couldn't I? Was this something only those in the biz could do? I would really like to have the ability to recover the data we needed as we needed it instead of having to make sure our initial visit together I copied everything at that time. I began googling and found this. Bingo. I immediately ran to Best Buy (couldn't wait for an internet purchase at a cheaper price point) and got this. This morning I turned on my fireplace, got out my tools and began disassembling my old crashed Gateway laptop. I found the harddrive, popped it in the enclosure case and plugged it in my kids desktop and it worked! The computer immediately recognized it as a new external drive, and there the files were. YEAH! The process was sooooo easy. It actually took me longer to gather the tools, unscrew all the screws and to locate the harddrive (I've never been inside a laptop before). I am definately on my way back to BestBuy to buy another one for the other laptop. The best thing is I'm doing it myself, I'm doing my version of recycling (going green you know) and I now have two more devices to work as additional drives for anything I need.
My dad is thrilled, he wasn't aware of this either. And from the information found at that website, you can do the same thing from harddrives from desktops. The only difference is the size of enclosure you need; 2.5" for laptop harddrives and 3.5" for desktop harddrives.
I'm so happy!
