Laptop hard drive won't power on?

Question

I had some problems with an old laptop and wasn't able to use the laptop itself. I bought an adapter to connect my laptop hard drive to my desktop PC. I had quite a bit of trouble installing in properly and ended up corrupting my other hard drive. Fix'd all that, even took it to a PC shop and used 5 other methods including USB connectors to try and connect the disk. No matter what nothing seems to detect the hard drive. I'm assuming its not powering on? Maybe its dead or the needle is broken?? I booted it earlier for a split second and it seemed to be powering on but now nothing! Any help would be appreciated. Trying to recover about 20GBs of stuff, have also tried Spin Rite but obviously it doesnt help because the laptop now wont even recognize any hard drives installed.

Answer 1

is the hard drive spinning when you couple power up to it? if it is then the power is there, and you could have lost the MBR (master boot record) first sectors on the driver that inform the computer what size and sectors to use.

if it is spinning than you next step is to e-mail the manufacturers and get advice from them on what you can do to save your data,

here is a tip if u know anything about DOS and you have a floppy boot disk,

on your desk top computer go into the Bios disable your HDD enable the flopy disk drive save the settings, and shut down couple up the laptop hard drive to ur desktop then reboot with the floppy disk
by the way you will need a windows 98 boot disk.. at the dos prompt a:> type fdisk it will boot up fdisk and it should see the drive and tell you what it is. 10 gig what ever. if it dose then the disk is working if it don't then trash it. if it dose see the drive get back to me and I can take you farther and hope to save your data

don't forget to go back into your bios and reset your hard drive to enable.. or it won't boot up your system

bfn