To think that my precious data on old hard drive is not actually gone

[PyjamaDayToday]

I needed a new hard drive in my laptop. Dell fitted it and the guy put my old hard dive in a 2.5 SATA casing thingy and showed me that the hard drive was functioning and the data could be recovered (not sure if thats the right word) and then put on the laptop again.

So i bought one of these SATA thingys and plugged in the old hard drive and now i don't know what to do.

There's some precious photos of DF who is no longer with us so really want to be able to do this but just don't know how to do it.

AIBU to think i can do this?

so have taken the advice of Talk and ordered a better device

Unless there's something wrong with your laptop, it's highly unlikely that simply throwing more current at the problem will help. It's also possible the caddy is defective or the disk is mis-installed. Taking the disk out and reseating it might be worth trying.

I know it's not really the time to say it, but can I just mention the mantra of the IT professional: "it the data isn't in two locations, it may as well not exist". Disk drives fail. If your only copy is on a loose drive in a USB caddy, something's already gone wrong. Once you recover this data, for God's sake back it up properly.

Don't panic. The data will be there so if you can't get it working with the caddy, last resort you can always take it into a small independent computer shop and get them to do it for you - they will have a caddy that they use for this kind of thing all the time.

Might be worth taking the whole kit to one of those shops and getting them to show you how to do it too, in case it's faulty. Go in and ask first and you'll be able to gauge whether they are friendly or not.

But YY be very careful with the hard drive in the meantime - keep it still and don't expose it to extremes of temperature.