I have has a gate way laptop for over 2 years. I have had the power supply fixed 5 times and it is no longer under warranty. So I am looking at getting a better laptop. It is currently broken so I only have as much battery life as there is. I want to get most of the files on it to my computer. I am wondering how much it costs to get that hard drive removed and inserteed into a hard drive case thing to use as a external. Or how much to get that hard drive transfered to a external hard drive. And where can this be done.

This post has been edited by tractor: Jan 8 2008, 01:49 AM

I had a problem with a Hard Drive and the local Computer shop snagged all the info and placed it on a DVD for $30 CDN. It was an old 6Gig HDD. But even if they need to do several DVD's it should not be a lot of money.

I'm not sure about converting that harddrive into an external harddrive, you would likely need a custom case for it; however, you could get an external harddrive (one the size of your current one of course) and copy everything onto the external harddrive. I know with my 160 GB USB 2.0 external harddrive I can get a transfer rate of about 1 gig per minute (not sure the accual transfer rate, but that's about what i got, transfered 6 gigs in about 6-8 minutes); however, if you get one that doesn't require an extra power cable for it, it will use your battery faster, so be careful if your battery won't last long enough. I hope this helps.

Assuming it is a standard 2.5" laptop drive, and that there is nothing wrong with the drive, you should be able to take it out and put it in an external caddy. Then you can connect it to another computer via USB or IEEE1394 and read and write to it like a pen drive.

Scan.co.uk sell loads of them - they're all pretty much the same. They're a box you can slot the drive into, with a USB/IEEE1394 cable coming out the back. Some also have a power pack.

As for the cost of having it removed and placed in the caddy - you should be able to do it yourself. Have a look in the manual for your laptop, or a support website, for how to get the hard drive out. If you can't figure it out, take a photo of the bottom of your laptop, and I'll see if I can spot it. You should just need to unscrew the cover and remove the drive. Then you put it into the caddy and hook it up to another PC to backup all your files safely.

I never did and mods to it so I should be able to.

Assuming that your laptop's HDD is SATA, you can just take it out and plug it inside a desktop PC using the regular SATA data and power cable used by your desktop HDD.

Enn,seems not so easy thing just like above.

To make the life simple,just burning your data to the dvd-r,then got the old driver sold.

The problem is if you are getting another laptop there not like desktops computers. The parts are specific and thats why laptop modifications can be very expensive... As for wether or not the hard drive from your laptop would work in a computer depends on the part itself

Although the solution seem to be there I let the topic slide but it seems that isn't the case, and so the search was on.

Well I found this site that gives two solutions, one them already mentioned and that is taking your laptop hard drive and put it in a external USB enclosure, and they are fairly cheap and you can find one here, make sure your hard drive connection (SATA, PATA, IDE), matches the enclosure you purchase. Also make sure when your taking things apart your static clean or you could screw your hard drive and lose all the data.

The other method gets a bit trickery if you haven't messed with the inside of a desktop computer then go with the first method, but if you know your way around then click here and see what needs to be done.

So hopefully this solves everything, but of course if neither method works and you got the cash then go to a tech shop that does hard drive retrieval and let them do it.