Accessing hard drive on dead laptop?

[mesmerize]

My Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop will not start. I press the power button and absolutely nothing happens. I took it to Best Buy (Geek Squad) and they tested the power adapter and the battery and said both are fine, so according to them the problem is the motherboard.

I had been planning to buy a new laptop pretty soon anyway for various reasons, so I'm not terribly concerned about my old one dying, but I do need to retrieve several recent files on my hard drive that had not been backed up yet. The Geek Squad guy said they could do this for me for $100, but that seems like a lot to pay just to retrieve a few files.

So my question is, do I have any other options? What exactly is the process for retrieving files when the hard drive is (most likely) fine, but the computer itself has no power and cannot start?

Sorry if this is an obvious question, I'm new to this! Thanks in advance...

[2x3i5x]

http://www.wikihow.com/Recover-Data-from-the-Hard-Drive-of-a-Dead-Laptop


Please do take look at above link, it details how you can get the functional hard drive to read on a different computer since you mentioned that your laptop is not working but the hard drive is not broken.

[brett74]

Another thing that you can do is take the access cover off where the hdd is and then get a enclosure from like best buy or something and hook it up that way. it would be a usb hdd enclosure I have one and it works great

[patio]

Get one of these:...2.5# laptop to IDE converter...
8 Bucks.


This will enable you to hook up that drive to any working Desktop and retrieve your Datta.