Using external enclosure to recover data from notebook hard drives- HELP! =)

I've been troubleshooting a friend's laptop for the last two days and I'm reasonably certain that it is a goner! All signs lead to motherboard failure.

The system has two hard drives (an 80GB and a 120GB unit) and both have files that need to be copied. Unfortunately, the owner of the laptop did NOT perform backups of any sort!

I'm thinking the simplest way to recover the data on both drives is to connect them to a working system via an external enclosure. This is new territory for me because all of my laptop crashes in the past have been due to hard drive failure. I quickly learned that having current backups is essential. All I had to do was pop in a new hard drive, reinstall the O/S and drivers and use my backups to restore all data to normal.

This is my first time needing to access and copy data on a drive(s) that don't reside in an operable computer system! Is the external enclosure plan the best way to proceed or ???

The various options for enclosures is rather confusing, too. The drives from the dead laptop are shown as having an ATA-5 interface. The choices for the internal interface in a hard drive enclosure are- IDE, SATA or IDE & SATA. For these hard drives (ATA-5), I will need the IDE internal interface, correct? An enclosure with both IDE & SATA internal interfaces should also work, right?

The choices for external interface are USB 2.0, 1394 and eSATA (individuallly and in various combinations). I have all three ports on the system I'll be using to access the enclosure/hard drives. So I can choose any or all of the three interface choices, correct?

I feel like a moron asking such elementary questions, but this is new territory for me! I'd appreciate any input, reassurance or suggestions you guys can offer!

 

Yes, ATA-5 will need an IDE 2.5" enclosure.
I would personally get a 40 pin to 44 pin adapter and use that, as I have found that many 2.5" IDE enclosures require you to format the drive once it's installed, meaning you won't be able to pull data from it. I have not seen this with SATA yet.
This will do fine:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812119245
You will of course need a desktop with at least one IDE channel.

Also, you may have to take ownership of his Documents and Settings folder if he had a password. Info on that in my signature.

 

As Hep said this how to use 40 pin is probably the cheapest, but you could also go the other way 2.5" USB enclosure for SATA there's a few here one should suit, up to you which will work best for you.

 

USB2.0 external HDD case will be a better option than eSata since USB is a more adapted interface and allows you to backup the drive data to any working PC easily.

The laptop to desktop converter is another option but that needed to be handled more technically otherwise bent pins and broken wired may occur.

The incorrect partition info on the laptop HDD may cause the 2.5' HDD case to ask to format the HDD after connecting the laptop HDD to it. This happens sometimes, just for your reference.

Hope this helps!
Bill

 

You could go another way with this if you want: put the laptop HD in a desktop, and boot the system from desktop HD/laptop HD. Windows XP Registration of some sort might pop up (due to hardware change), but you can just use safe mode to bypass that. From there, you can simply copy the files out.

This happened to me recently, so I understand the frustration.

 

If the drives are suspect you might want to get the 44 pin to 40 pin converter as it'll be a lot faster than USB, if the drives are ok just the operating systems etc are junked then one of those multi format USB cable deals would be the easiest, and most useful down the road for similar operations. If the drives have issues you may have to use the freezer trick or similar methods and those tricks usually have a relatively limited usable time, so the faster you can rip the data off the drives the better.