Is there any way to recover the data on my laptop?
 

A while back, my laptop broke. Basically, when I turn it on, it shuts off automatically. Sometimes it stays on for a couple seconds, then it shuts off. Eventually it got to the point where I couldn’t turn it on at all. I replaced the battery and plugged it in without the battery and I still had the same problem.

So now I want to get some of the files I had on the hard drive. Is there any way to do this and transfer them to my other laptop? How would I go about doing this?

Also, what do you think the problem could have been? I got it 1.5 years ago, it was refurbished (it was a pretty old dell latitude d610), and I pretty much kept it on 24/7 without putting it on any cooling platform. I also left it plugged in 24/7. I almost never played games on it, though; I mainly just used the internet, listened to music, watched movies, and used word and powerpoint.

Thanks.

Buy an external 2.5" hard disk enclosure. Take out your laptop hard disk, put it inside, and see if you can read anything off it on another PC.

If it reads fine, then you must have a catastrophic failure on your laptop's other hardware, like motherboard, RAM, whatever.

If it doesn't read fine then there's your problem.

You don't even need an enclosure. There are awesome adapters that will let you plug in 3.5" and 2.5" ide hdds, and sata hdds and hook them up via USB so you don't need to put a drive in an enclosure to mount it. Go with that, as they tend to be pretty cheap.

If your laptop is shutting off that quickly, it could be a number of things. Does it post and/or show anything when it is able to stay on for any period of time? It could be a fan died and the computer just won't work if it can't detect the fan going, or it could be an actual hardware failure with the RAM/motherboard. Its hard to point out what the problem is if it just flat out dies though.

Having a direct line, without going through an enclosure, sounds really awesome, Shade. Now screwing in hard disks into enclosures is a thing of the past. It sounds like something I'd like to get.

Though I got a couple of questions:

1. I assume that 2.5" drives are powered through USB. How about 3.5" drives? Do you plug it in as normal?

2. Do you have any recommended brands? Taking a (very) quick look through Newegg, the cheapest I can find is around $20. It IS cheaper than most 3.5" enclosures, but not 2.5".

Most 2.5" drives can run off 1 USB port, but 3.5" cannot. If you really want a cheap way of doing this, just skip the enclosure or adapter and just plug into the IDE/SATA headers on the motherboard.

If it's too inconvenient to open your case every time you want to transfer files, just buy some long cables, open a PCI slot in the back of the case, run the cables through the slot, plug the HD in, etc.

(edit: I guess the above is assuming that you're not using a laptop)

Also, this is the cheapest adapter I could find if you still want to go that route, though I didn't find one for IDE: http://www.monoprice.com/products/pr...seq=1&format=2

I got this guy free when I bought my last HD and I'm a pretty huge fan of it. When you eject a drive it feels like you're popping a cart out of your SNES.

(That said, for that price it's way expensive. Also, mine was probably USB 2.0 and not 3.0.)

Newegg.com - BYTECC BT-300 USB 2.0 to IDE/SATA Adapter

This is the closest to what I have.

IDE 3.5" drives get powered by external power that comes with the adapter.