What was the nature of the failure? Was it a hard drive failure or an operating system crash? There are several different options depending on what's happened to your machine. When you switch the machine on does the hard drive make any unusual noises? If it is making any unusual noises then there is not much life left in it.
You will need a second machine with enough hard drive space to save your recovered data.
First download some recovery software:
www.pcinspector.de (You need File Recovery from here and install it onto recovery machine)
Second take the hard drive out of the laptop. Insert it into an external 2.5" hard drive USB enclosure. Place it inside an airtight bag and put it into a freezer for about an hour to cool the drive. This sounds weird but it works. I recently had a complete hard drive crash and managed to recover all 80GB's worth of data with this method.
Third connect the drive to the recovery machine's USB port.
Fourth fire up the software, search for lost drive and save data to your recovery machine.
You will need to keep the drive cool as there will be lots of disc activity, if the drive is capable of being read, so place a frozen gel pack underneath the drive enclosure to keep the drive cool.
This process can take several hours using the recovery software. You may be lucky enough to get the drive working as an external drive once it's connected to the recovery machine, in which case you can simply drag and drop using Win Explorer.
Good luck
Nawaz Hajiani, August 2006
