If for some reason your notebook fails to boot and you need to access data on the hard drive (I assume there is nothing wrong with the hard drive itself), you can use an external USB enclosure. This method is very simple and could be very useful when you need an emergency access to your data on the hard drive.
First of all you’ll have to buy an external USB enclosure for notebook hard drives. These enclosures are inexpensive and usually you can buy them in any local computer store. You also can find a wide variety of external enclosures on the Internet. Make sure to buy a correct one, enclosures for ATA and SATA hard drives are different (the connector inside the case will be different). Usually the enclosure includes the case and the USB cables.
Now remove the hard drive from the laptop. For this example I’m using an ATA hard drive.
Open up the enclosure case and connect the hard drive to the connector inside. After that insert the hard drive into the case.
After everything is assembled, you are ready to connect this device to any working computer (notebook or PC). The enclosure cable usually has two USB connectors on one end, make sure both of them are connected to the computer. You don’t need any external power supply for the enclosure because the hard drive gets power through USB ports. If the computer you are connecting the enclosure to runs Windows 2000 or higher, you will not need any device drivers. As soon as you connect the enclosure to the computer, the external hard drive should be detected and recognized automatically. After that the external hard drive will appear in My Computer and you can access it as any other hard drive in the computer.
If you are getting “Access denied” message when you are trying to access your files on the hard drive, you’ll have to take ownership of a file or folder.
My previous post explains how to connect a notebook hard drive to a desktop PC via IDE hard drive adapter.
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August 15th, 2010 at 9:21 am
Warren,
Sometimes, after connecting an external drive, you have to restart the PC. Have you tried that?
Take a look at your external drive in Disk Management (found in Computer Management). What does it say? Can you see file system (probably NTFS) shown on the drive?
August 14th, 2010 at 5:15 am
I have placed my old (Windows Vista) notebook HDD in a NexStar-SX enclosure and connected it to my new (Windows 7) notebook. The enclosure appears to be working fine and it is recognized as a device on my control panel. However the old connected HDD is not showing up as a lettered disk drive on my new notebook. Can anyone help? Thanks.
June 25th, 2010 at 10:13 am
Dear sir
Thank you very much for your advice. It sounds simple.
I think I can manage to do that.
Anna
June 25th, 2010 at 12:20 am
Anna,
The best way would be buying an external USB enclosure. After that you remove the laptop hard drive and install it into the enclosure. You can connect this enclosure to any other desktop PC or laptop via USB cables.
Yes. You can connect the external enclosure with hard drive to the netbook and transfer files.
June 24th, 2010 at 2:25 pm
Dear Sir
I have an old laptop which is completely dead. The power socket is broken so I can’t switch it on anyway. I don’t have a desktop which I can transfer the laptop hard driver to. Is it possible to copy the laptop hard driver to a new external hard driver?( I am thinking of buying one if I need it.) I recently bought a netbook(only 1 GB memory capacity though.Is there any way I can use this netbook instead of using a desktop? I don’t know the differences between the external USB closure and the external hard driver. Could you kindly explain to me please?
Please, help me.
Anna
June 16th, 2010 at 11:01 pm
Steve,
The file name is Outlook.pst
The location depends on the version of Outlook, but you can search the hard drive for “.pst” files.
After you find the file, import it into new Outlook installation.