Hard Drive on Laptop fried - best way to recover data?

[MrsDmitriTippensKrushnic]

My poor baby

My life is on that hard drive

Okay mild exaggeration, but there's a lot of stuff on there that I'd like back and I'd like to try and recover it myself. We've removed the drive from the laptop (won't even boot up) and tried accessing it via one of the other PCs but although it could see it, it says that it contains 0MB of data... Is that it? Is it just all gone? Is there any way of recovering anything (that doesn't involve taking it to be groped by strange people at PC World?)

What happens when you try to boot it up? Does it come up with any messages at all?

Does it make any strange clunking noises?

If it's a hardware failure then short of sending to an expensive specialist then no.

If it's a software fault then quite possibly yes you can get your data back.

Yes to odd clunking noise (at least it was when it was in the laptop)

1. Toshiba page...

1. Black screen with flashing white cursor...

1. For Realtek RTL8101E/8102E PCI-E Ethernet Controller v1.07 (080320)

PXE-E61: Media test failure, check cable PXE-M0F: Exiting PXE ROM No bootable device -- insert boot disk and press any key

DH, I think, is being too nice to tell me it's trashed beyond all help. We've actually ordered another harddrive to pimp up a console which I shall claim so I'll get my laptop back. It's just all the personal stuff that I didn't want to back up on the family hard drive - I'm such an idiot.

When my harddrive started to go (i dont know if it was as terminal as yours) it wouldn't boot or anything.

I got a cheap as chips kit to convert a laptop hard drive into an external harddrive. I then plugged it into a working computer (not to boot off just like a usb memory stick) and the computer was able to "see" the files that weren't corrupted and I just copied them off. A good few of the files were irretrievable though.

DH is fairly techy so we've managed to try that - he plugged it into the standalone and it recognised it was a harddrive, but it can't see any of the data.

Given the clunking and the fact you've plugged it into another PC and it doesn't see the data but recognises the disk then I do have to say that it sounds like it's gone to silicon heaven.

Sorry

Oh poo. Thank you all anyway. Always worth given MN a try