Working in I.T. Support I have to think ahead and one problem I needed a solution for was Data recovery for laptop hard disks.

Now if a desktop PC’s hard disk fails you can usually just connect the faulty hard disk as another disk in a working system and recover the data.

However laptop hard disks due to their size cannot co-exist internally in another laptop or PC.

Picture: 2.5″ Laptop Hard Disk

For that you would  need an external USB hard disk enclosure with the correct connections either IDE or SATA.

So for my box of tricks I ordered an inexpensive (£15) Akasa P2 SERIES 2.5″ ESATA/USB EXT (see main picture).

So finally this week the call came in for a user of a Dell Latitude that had dropped the laptop and required their data recovered.

Once the laptop was in my hands I carefully removed the hard disk. In this example it was a SATA drive.

I plugged it into the Akasa hard disk enclosure and connected the supplied power and data cables and the faulty hard disk was now accessible.

Tip: Both the power and data run on USB so there is no external power issues to worry about.

Not only was I able to recover the data but I also ran some hard disk tools that fixed the corrupted operating system and the hard disk was back in working order back in the original laptop.

So £15 well spent.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 24th, 2008 at 8:23 am and is filed under Blog Entries, Equipment Reviews, Tech Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.