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