Might sound daft, but I have a IDE/Sata to USB hard drive connection kit to access data from regular hard drives. My mum's laptop has given up (was powering up, but not booting up it seemed) so I am wondering if I can get the data from it? The drive is one of those little ones that pushes in at the end and "meshes" with slots in the laptop - appears to be a bunch of about nine pins, small gap, then bunch of 4 pins.

Hopefully a kit exists for this too?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/USB-2-0-to-SATA-Serial-ATA-15-7-22P-Adapter-Cable-For-2-5-HDD-Laptop-Hard-Drive-/140919743984?pt=UK_Computing_Other_Computing_Networking&hash=item20cf78a5f0

Is this it? Not sure.

From the description, it does sound like the hard disk is just SATA - so that would be fine. Could you post a picture of it, just to be sure?

Sometimes, manufacturers will use a non-standard adapter between the disk and the laptop connector, which usually just pull off the disk to reveal the standard IDE or SATA connector.

I doubt it matters but its a 40gb drive.

As said by Craig... sounds just like a normal SATA connection - there will be no problem plugging it into the adaptor.

Just beware.. if the drive is dying, and the machine you plug it into recognises and asks to scan it - say no!

Ive recently used this free windows tool to recover info from a dying hard drive: http://www.piriform.com/recuva - it can take a while (as the hdd will be trying to recover itself in the background) but in my case it got about 90% of the data back

I doubt it matters but its a 40gb drive.

Does that plastic bit with the pins detach from the rest of the drive?

OK. It's definitely a SATA disk - but that grey bit on the end is one of those manufacturer-specific adapters I mentioned. Try to prise it off gently with a small flat-blade screwdriver. It should then reveal the standard SATA connector

OK. It's definitely a SATA disk - but that grey bit on the end is one of those manufacturer-specific adapters I mentioned. Try to prise it off gently with a small flat-blade screwdriver. It should then reveal the standard SATA connector

This..

Actually on closer inspection the drive is still in a "frame" - there will be four screws either on the sides, or the bottom securing them together

Does that plastic bit with the pins detach from the rest of the drive?

it does I was wondering how the hell the SATA connection was meant to go on Trying it now. Cheers

OK - Its talking, but won't let me look at it until I format it.... That's not the idea! LOL

I can now hear the drive making little laser gun type noises..... I only want to be able to read it without having to format it.... [sigh]

Time to fire up some file recovery software A good start would be the free PhotoRec.

Aha! Finally let me in and I can see Mum's "My Documents" folder.

Great success!

Brilliant news! Such a relief

Yeah - Mum will be happy. She was going to take the HDD to her tech people at her university department, but no need to worry now.

Copied about 400MB of stuff on to my own PC so at least have a backup now.