Laptop is dead – Long live the laptop!

Well, my “venerable” HP Pavillion laptop, acquired just a bit over 5 years ago, has finally bitten the dust. I got it for the consulting work I was doing and it got humped down into DC and back every day for several of those years. I wasn’t overly hard on it but it operated in a few (shall we say?) less than optimum environments. A few days ago I smelled a very unwelcome burning-silicon smell and found that the power supply – both the brick I plug into the wall and the internal unit in the laptop – were so hot I couldn’t hold onto them at all. After quickly unplugging the brick from the wall I had to grab onto the power cord at the back of the machine and pull on it with both hands to get it out of the back of the computer. Looking in both the plug barrel and the port on the laptop, I could see there’d been some arcing. The plug was basically welding itself to the power port.

Needless to say, I don’t want to plug that thing back in but I do need the data that’s on it. Some of the engineers I’ve worked with have shown me some external hard drives they’ve used that were, essentially, laptop drives mounted in an enclosure. Sounded like just the ticket. I looked around and got one of these:

Rocketfish 2.5″ Hard Drive Enclosure

Model: RF-HD25
 
 
Turn your old internal hard drive into an external hard drive with this enclosure kit designed to accommodate a 2.5″ PATA/EIDE hard drive.
 
Product Features

• Easily insert 1 internal 2.5″ PATA/EIDE hard drive (not included) without using any tools
• High-speed USB 2.0 powered for quick and simple connection
• Stores and mirrors digital content, such as music, games, photos, documents and more to securely back up important files
• One-touch button for simple backup, restore and synchronize
• Aluminum design with aerodynamic cooler fin for improved heat dissipation
• Plug-and-play
• Includes USB cable, carrying pouch, cleaning cloth, screw package, CD driver and user manual

After almost killing myself getting the hard drive out of the old laptop, the installation into the enclosure was simplicity itself. Once in there and the lid closed up, I plugged the dual USB cable into 2 USB ports on the new computer (it uses 2 to provide the correct amount of power) and within seconds my old laptop hard drive was recognized as a mass storage device. There were some issues with security and permissions that had to be set correctly to allow the new machine to access the old hard drive, but once I’d figured out what the process was it went very quickly. This is a good product, folks, and you should remember it if you ever have the need as I have.