Dell Inspiron died, need to recover/back up data from harddrive

Ok, this is my friends laptop (Dell Inspiron 6400), she needs files from her hard drive for her exams coming up very soon.

The only idea I can come up with so that she can get her files back tonight is if she removes her hard drive, and removes the hard drive from her roommates Toshiba Tecra, puts the harddrive into that laptop and have that laptop run with that harddrive so that she can put her files on a cd or put them online.

My only concerns with doing this, and I hope that someone with experience or technical know-how can tell me (I'm not actually with them to see this), where can I find out if both laptops even have the same size laptop hard drive, will putting a different hard drive in a laptop format the hard drive, and what can they do to make sure they don't wreck the hard drives as they're handling them?

I would deeply appreciate any help or tips that I can get, if we could get this done tonight it would be a huge help. Thanks in advance.

 

well, one is dell, the other toshiba, its more than likely that toshiba computer doesnt recognize the dell hard drive.
you have to put the dell hard drive in a dell laptop to get the files out of it.

 

^^^not correct, her harddrive cannot be used in any Dell, it can only be booted off of as a primary boot drive in an inspiron 6400 or e1505. They share the same motherboard

Your best bet is to find someone with a desktop. All you need is a SATA cable and a SATA power connection. You can plug a laptop SATA harddrive into a desktop and than transfer the files off of it. The inspiron 6400/E1505 uses SATA harddrives, so you can natively use them as a secondary drive in a desktop.
You will not be able to boot off of her harddrive in another system, because the drive will only boot into windows on a inspiron 6400 or a Inspiron e1505 motherboard.
You will need a working desktop to get the files off. Simply connect the harddrive from your friends 6400 into an available SATA port and copy the files from their.

What is wrong with the system?
Does it turn on?

K-TRON

 

I agree with K-tron, regardless of the similarity of the hard drives, size and interface, you will not be able to boot the operating system to another laptop computer.

 

Put the drive in the external enclosure, then you can copy files to any hdd
or record them to dvd/cd. The simplest solution.

 

i am attempting to recover my friends HDD data etc.

the Dell 6400 died and i purchased an external2.5 casing which works great however all the files i am trying to view dont allow me to see anything?
can just use this now as an external HDD. but i really want to help them by giving the data back and then they have another usable drive.
so my question is how do i recover data out of this drive it all seems to be locked or hidden?
i can get passwords but it does not ask when opening folders?
please any tips many thanks

 

you have to get permissions. go to the drive, right click properties, go to permissions, there change the owner in the advanced settings to yourself (not the admin but your username), and then grant every user at ("users") at least read rights so you can read all data and copy it out.

that's more or less what you can do to get full access.. obviously, you don't need to do that on the full hdd, the c:\users\hername or c:\documents and settings\hername would be enough, if you can see those.

 

waaaaa??

Assuming that the old drive itself is in working order and the only problem is in the old laptop mobo or something like that.

Go to the local PC monger and get a usb/sata/ide adapter combo cable.

Costs all of $25-.

Now plug the whole thing into any machine. If you plug into a winderz machine it will probably ask for the admin password of the windows instance that is on the salvaged hdd. Once in, drop into the directories as necessary and copy the files off. No need to seize permissions or anything.

If the original owner of the hard drive has changed the partition info from basic to dynamic, you might have to import the volume via disk manager (inside of device manager).

If you plug into a Linux machine, you'll have to mount the external drive as an ntfs volume. Probably no password necessary.

I can do this kind of work in my sleep. If I have the necessary hardware adapter at hand, I can pull the user files off an external drive in about 15 minutes. Going through this exercise once or twice is all you need to get good at it.

Which is about 12 hours less than you guys have been debating this issue.

 

An external case is the best option, I agree, but you have a decent chance of being able to put the hard drive in another computer and have it work, provided Vista is the OS on it.

Vista doesn't freak out like XP does in that regard. That said, it won't work well until drivers are installed, but it might be the fastest method. (Provided that external cases are hard to find locally and that you have to purchase one online).

 

I agree with the external case supporters. You can get one for around $10 and connect your HDD to it. And you will connect the box to another computer via USB interface. Done! (Assuming that the HDD works fine, of course...)

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You may not be able to read files from My Documents folder if her hard drive is formatted with NTFS and protected by a password.