Free laptop.

[scracha]

Ok hard drives out and in the Freezer..

Sounds crazy but im up for it...

Hope its the hard drive in there...

Crazy Steve...

I dunno who's joking now. Sticking a hard drive in a freezer for a good 4 hours or so sometimes gets $@#$cked hard drive's going for an hour or so. Works well enough in order to get non essential data off a hard drive. For really essential data, leave the thing alone and send the drive off to a recovery expert. They do the "clean room" thing and then send you a very large bill. For the average "home" user...the freezer thing is worth a crack though.

Seriously...the problem probably isn't your hard drive. If I was closer to dorkland I'd probably nip round and sort it for ya. Get a geek round (I'm surprised you've not been inundated with offers from techy-savvy kiwibikers) or take it to a geek shop...it won't be that expensive.

[pete376403]

You can get a 2.5" (laptop drive) to 3.5" (desktop size) hard drive adaptor from Jaycar for $15 (item PLO754) Assuming you have (or have access to) a desktop computer - This fits older IDE type drives, which from your description of the laptop, is what you are most likely to have.
Put the adapter on the notebook drive.
disconnect the CD ROM (DVD, whatever) from IDE 1 and connect the notebook drive here. Leave the PC hard drive on IDE 0.
Boot up the PC. Setup should detect the notebook drive. Start windows as normal and open "My Computer" The notebook drive should be there as D drive
Copy as much as you want from D to C.
If that doesn't make sense I suggest you dont try it. If the notebook drive isn't detected or doesn't appear in My Computer then it is possibly munted. If the data on it means a lot to you, send it to Computer Forensics in Auckland.
For about $5K they will extract the data and send it to you on CD or DVD.

[scracha]

Wot he said. Cept maybe use an IDE -> USB adapter so you can just plug the #@$cker into another PC without opening up the other Pc.

[Timati]

Have you got a network card in the laptop? If so, you can use a cross-over cable to connect to another PC and use data recovery software. Helped out friend of mine out a couple months back who was in the same boat. There isn't any guarantee as to a full recovery but you could recover most of it.

[scracha]

Have you got a network card in the laptop? If so, you can use a cross-over cable to connect to another PC and use data recovery software. Helped out friend of mine out a couple months back who was in the same boat. There isn't any guarantee as to a full recovery but you could recover most of it.

Not it the laptop ain't switching on he can't.

[Cajun]

Steve - if no one helped ya yet

Drop me a line, if you can get it to me in tauranga, i see what i can do get the data off.

[Lias]

Years ago MT and I used to work for The PC Company and know their old products entirely too well. The L8400k was an asus product and your lucky it was one of the better laptops the pc co ever sold. Be eternally grateful you didnt buy one of their ECS laptops.

If you want to send it down to me, I'm reasonably confident I could get the data off, I have access to some fairly powerful data recovery software. I might even be able to figure out whats wrong with the laptop, I think I still have the maintenace guide for it on CD somewhere.