After much well-deserved nagging from Mrs. P., I finally got ’round to trying to get her files off the laptop that I destroyed, via stupidity.

Stopped by a couple of office supply stores; but they only offered the enclosure online, but for twice the price they’d do it for me.

Best Buy had two choices: a simple cable and an enclosure. They were about the same price, so I chose the enclosure.

So I get home and pull the old laptop out of the box o’ rice it has convalescing in for the last few weeks (to no effect), yank the hard drive out, slap it into the enclosure, tighten the screws, and plug the USB into my desktop.

Nothing.

I wait.

Windows installing software…

Windows failed to install software.

I sigh; and hang my head in shame.

I open the enclosure, contemplating how much drywall repair I’ll need to do if I hurl the cursed thing at the wall, when I decide to plug it back in without the enclosure and make sure the handshake is good.

Bingo! Everything is there. And now, it is all on another drive as well. Phew.

I haven’t told her yet. Already added her contacts and favorites to her new laptop. She’ll be back soon. How long do I wait to tell her?

Thanks gang, for your input.

PS: Insignia USB 3.0 Laptop Hard Disk Drive Enclosure

My success was so great that I purchased a device that was to let me connect and SATA or IDE drive via usb. The ext time someone brought me a dead laptop I tried to recover the data and it was a total failure. So my experience is 50/50.

SATA would be very good (recursively Serial ATA) because it’s finally a universal hard drive interface. Look for a small plastic connector, like a big USB connector but with sleeker lines. The key identifying feature is that the row of pins, about half an inch long, takes a short jog at the end, like an elongated “L”. In your laptop, it probably would have been connected through an oval-cross-sectioned cable like a double-scale modular telephone cord.

If your drive matches that, then it’s worth opening up the PC to see if it uses SATA, and that it has more than one port. Because if there’s only one port, it must remain plugged in to your PC’s single hard drive for the computer to boot. But if there are two or more ports, even if you have to unplug one of the drives other than the boot drive, you can copy data off the laptop drive.

If you’re constrained to one SATA port on your PC, that’s when you might want to consider an external enclosure that adapts your laptop drive to USB. BTW, when using USB for bulk data transfer, you really want USB 3.0. USB 2 crawls along when used for external hard drives, but it’s better than nothing if that’s all you’ve got.

You would also have to use an external box if your PC doesn’t have the same hard drive interface as the drive. Then it’s just a matter of searching for a box with the same HD interface on one side, to USB (3) on the other.

It’s possible to escalate to higher levels of geekiness, but I hope not.

If it’s USB, it usually plug-and-plays right in. If it’s SATA or something, and it matches your desktop’s interior connectors, you can plug it in as a desktop hard drive and it should mount into the system unless the format is different.