Recovering data from a broken laptop

Written on Monday, December 29th, 2008 | Filed under: Technology

As I previously shared that my laptop motherboard had died, I needed to extract all the data from the hard disk drive in the unit.  Without any way to power up the laptop, I needed to remove the hard disk drive in the laptop. Removing the hard disk drive is simple enough and many people do so to upgrade their capacity as one of the easiest laptop upgrades.  However, since I just needed the important files from my hard disk drive, I needed an external enclosure.  After reading many reviews, I found one that was cheap and simple.  I went with this Rosewill RX234 IDE interface unit here.  I can only say I am more than pleased by the unit because it is small like one of those passport hard drives and it uses USB to power up.  It looks pretty slick since it is tiny and operates efficiently.

It would have been simpler if  the screen died or I screwed up my operating system installation and need to reformat.  If that is the problem your experiencing, you can connect an external monitor to your laptop to use as a display or if your operating system will not boot and you did not partition your hard disk drive and need to obtain files from the master boot drive, then get yourself a copy of one of the many live Linux distros.  Live Linux distrobutions just means that if you are able to boot from CD or USB, it loads its entire operating system before loading your operating system from your hard disk dirve.  From there, you can either connect an external hard drive or USB flash drive and grab necessary important files and then wipe the hard disk drive and reformatting it with a fresh install of your favorite operating system.

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