A few weeks ago an old friend of mine sent me a Face­book mes­sage say­ing that he lap­top was run­ning out of hard drive space and wanted my opin­ion on what she should do. Of course, I told her to get an exter­nal hard drive to store all of her music, pho­tos, and movies so she went out, bought a West­ern Dig­i­tal Pass­port, and couldn’t have been happier. 

A week or so after that, she sent me another mes­sage say­ing she had spilled some­thing all over her lap­top and that it was fried. She went to Geek Squad and they wanted gobs of money to save the remain­ing data on her hard drive (mostly school doc­u­ments). She wanted to know if I could help in any way so I blindly accepted the chal­lenge of doing it for free. I had dis­as­sem­bled some lap­tops in the past so how hard could it be?Like any good repair­man, I started by unscrew­ing every screw I could find on her lap­top and tried to pry the bot­tom off so I could take a look at the moth­er­board. After some strug­gling, I decided to Google for instruc­tions on remov­ing the hard drive from a Dell Insp­iron 6000. Aren’t those Dell guys great? Those were the only two screws I hadn’t man­aged to get out, but once I did the hard drive slid right out.

My first incli­na­tion was to just plug in the lap­top hard drive as an extra drive in my Ubuntu box. Dummy me, rush­ing to get some­thing done, didn’t think that I only had  PATA con­nec­tors and that the lap­top hard drive was of the SATA vari­ety. I thought we were stuck, but then remem­bered I had an old West­ern Dig­i­tal Pass­port I didn’t use any­more and would be will­ing to bust into. This time I did a lit­tle homework:

 

It was pretty easy to pop it open and switch out the hard dri­ves. My friend Claire brought her exter­nal and it was just a few min­utes to trans­fer the files between her old lap­top hard drive, that was con­nected through the SATA to USB con­nec­tor from the West­ern Dig­i­tal Pass­port, to her new exter­nal drive she recently purchased.

Lessons learned:

  1. Geek Squad is once again over­priced and overrated
  2. Hack­ing left­over devices is fun and some­times useful
  3. Blindly approach­ing tech prob­lems still impresses your non-tech friends