Help My Laptop is No More

[paul]

I managed to drop my laptop last Friday causing considerable damage. Anyway, I was initially able to hook it up to my PC monitor, but I rather stupidly didn't take the opportunity to dump the contents of the hard drive. Now it seems that I can't even get the thing to boot.

Anyway, I've a new laptop on the way and would still like to access the old hard drive if possible and dump onto the new laptop. Does anyone know how I might be able to access the hard drive content on my old laptop if I can't power it up as normal? I can't tell what kind of drive is in there. I'm guessing it's not IDE, but I could be wrong. For reference it was a HP Pavililion ze4300

Any help advice much appreciated.

[EvilBoris]

I'd imagine you'd be able to pop it out of the casing and connect it up to a PC to save the contents

[briareos_kerensky]

Any help advice much appreciated.

It can be IDE or SATA, depending on how old is the notebook and/or if it was a top, middle or low end model. Either way, there are adaptors for both connector types. They are easy to find in any good hardware shop and once you've got it, it's easy to recover data from it...if it didn't suffered any damage from the fall.

[Mayhem]

Indeed, that's how the data from my last work laptop was recovered: extract HD from laptop, put in caddy, connect to another PC and transfer.