How to raise a dead laptop.

Thundyrkatz

Hello everyone

I need a little laptop advice.

My sisters laptop is dead, turns out that the socket for the charger is broken, so it can't be charged anymore. So far the quote for fixing it is a couple hundred bucks. We can just about replace the laptop for that price.

The catch is that the dead laptop has a whole bunch of pictures that we need to get off of it.

So, how easy is it to get data off of a Laptop hard drive? Or any thought on how we could charge the battery?

Thanks in advance for your help!

saltiness

Do you by any chance have an external hard drive? The smaller ones use laptop hard drives and it's usually pretty easy to pop them open and swap in a different hard drive to pull the data off it.

MrIamMe

Charge the battery in a similar laptop if you can, or borrow a battery of the same type.

The place where you buy the laptop might be able to help with this

Essee

As an alternative to what saltiness suggested, it should be fairly easy to find a 2.5" notebook hard drive enclosure (rather than taking apart an existing external drive). They're pretty cheap (check out the prices on Newegg), but try to find something that looks reasonably reliable, from SOME brand you recognize if feasible, as when a friend of the family bought one to help my mom get her data off an old laptop, he got the cheapest available, so the connection was really touchy and we had to hold it together while transferring stuff. Mercifully, it didn't seem to corrupt anything in the process, but if it's got a poor connection it definitely could. Do you know if the hard drive is IDE or SATA? Recent laptops have the latter, but older ones could have the former. Some enclosures have both connectors (although looking briefly through Newegg I have yet to spot one with both), but definitely not all, so double-check either the hard drive or enclosure info before buying one. It seems from my searching that some enclosures may have a limit on the size of hard drives they can read, so try to double-check that restriction before buying one, as well.

Once you get an enclosure that can connect to the hard drive, you should be good to go! If it's a really good enclosure, you could conceivably even keep using the drive in that enclosure as extra storage, assuming you know it's still good. I would be a little cautious with that, though, since if her laptop died that hard drive might be aging a bit.

Primesghost

I second the external enclosure idea. You can usually pick em up for 30-40 bucks and they're easy to assemble.

Do you know if the drive is IDE or SATA?

If it's SATA you can just hook it up to a desktop computer and access it as a second hard drive.

Essee

Primesghost wrote: »

I second the external enclosure idea. You can usually pick em up for 30-40 bucks and they're easy to assemble.

Looks like Newegg has a fair number from reputable brands for about half that, though, and I know it's still possible to get a good one for around that price. So, even better!