S.o.s!

[Addison]

I am in a writer's worst nightmare. Somehow my laptop (an MSI Windows thing) overheated. It said it was shutting down, it had shut down, I closed it before we went out to dinner. When I came home I heard my lap top still whirring. It-was-HOT! I opened it, the screen was stuck in the "Good bye" window. I held the power button until I heard it turn off. But when I left it alone for a two days and tried to turn it back on, it wouldn't.

I took it to my local IT whiz, who's also my step-dad, who said my harddrive was overheated. It's clinging to life by a thread.

I know a lot of you right now are thinking "Did you back up your work?!". The good news is, yes, I have a flash drive with everything in it. Bad news, it was plugged into the lap top the whole time so now that too is fried!

This is a desperate call to anyone with any sort of computer experience. As far as I can tell, to get the right tech to save my stuff it will cost a good-sized hole in my pocket. But my techie's experience is more with data, internet and stuff, he's still learning about this stuff. Anyone with any technological/electrical experience, please help!

Thank you.

 

[CupofJoe]

I'd love to be able to help you but my only experience is at a corporate level and I don't have a good story.
We spent a lot of money [£1000+] to get a professional recovery team to rescue a disk [that we had begged to be allowed to back-up - but that's another story]. They took the disc and then six weeks to say there was nothing they could do...

 

[Nihal]

I have no experience with extreme overheating. I'm puzzled that your pen drive died as well, it's not an internal drive so comparing to them it should be relatively safe from the heat. Did you try it on other PCs without using the auto run, opening it straight through the explorer instead?

I've never played with a laptop HDs, but I believe it uses a SATA (or IDE, hahaha) connection like any other HD. There are useful adapter kits to connect internal HDs through an USB. They usually come with SATA connections, an IDE as well and the USB one, some use external power so they come with a cable to get electricity too.

You remove the HD from the laptop case taking care to not touch the circuits and place it over a clean towel or any not-easily-melted-nor-conductive surface; then just plug the HD on the correct connection, plug the USB on another already turned on computer and turn on the adapter.

If the HD isn't completely dead you'll be able to see the data on this other computer as if it was any other external media. I would expect to find some corrupted files. I would locate the most important files first, copy them then copy everything else without wasting time browsing and deciding what I should keep and not. If the HD is really damaged the most time you keep it powered worse it'll get.

 

[Ophiucha]

It's kind of luck whether or not you'll be able to recover a particular file - although having a flash drive to work with too gives you a chance. It's possible that enough of the drive is fried that the parts that hold the OS, the basic boot data, are gone or corrupted enough that you can't run it. But that doesn't mean your files are. You'll need to connect it to another, working computer. From another computer, you can run a file recovery program - Recuva is a good one and just look through the directory for your files. For word documents, this is often possible - they are very small files, even if you've got 100k+ words in them, which means that if they are there at all, they are likely uncorrupted.

It may be that other parts of your laptop have melted or corrupted, and you'd need to get someone to remove the HDD itself and hook that up to an external drive reader - could be tricky depending on your type of laptop (some make it hard to take them apart) but it's manageable. If you've got a Macbook or another 'difficult' brand, as I'd call them, you'd want to take it to a tech.

The flash drive may be easier, and cheaper if you don't want to try any DIY. If the hard drive isn't damaged, just the connectors/USB, then you could get a tech guy to fix that for you in the range of under $40. If you have a soldering iron, you could do it yourself, although at this point I wouldn't risk it. If you can plug it in okay, and the HD is damaged, then you can run a recovery program the same as you would above.

 

[Caged Maiden]

take it to geek squad and pay for a hard drive retrieval. I did that last year when my laptop shut down after contracting the FBI virus. I had three computers that wouldn't even turn on anymore and for $400 I got my laptop fixed and de-virused, I got my other two old computers all retrieved, and I got an external hard drive with all my info on it. It was my crusade to save my baby photos because all the videos and pictures we took of my first son were on the first computer and the second son was on the second computer. So... for the one price, I saved all my baby photos and got the hard drive to use with everything in the future.

I'd recommend it because the computer now has a one year warranty and I can bring it back to them any time for cleaning.

 

[Addison]

Alright, the USB thing didn't work. It could only recognize the hard drive but it couldn't find the data stored on it. My IT source had a full schedule (work and training) so he didn't have any more ideas. But I haven't tried the other which, I believe, was to plug the hard drive into another computer. I'm trying that in a few minutes once the good computer is open.

 

[Steerpike]

Download a version of Linux like Linux Mint and burn to CD (on another computer of course). Then boot the fried computer from the CD. If the drive is still good you should be able to read it and recover all files.

 

[Steerpike]

Actually, for Linux Mint you probably need to burn to a DVD, not a CD, because of size. If you don't have a DVD drive and want to try this with a CD, I can look for a smaller distro. If you have another computer to download and burn the CD from.