So, my friends <2 year old Dell laptop recently cashed itself in. Smell of toasted electronics and pretty much dead to the world. Speculated that it was a power problem and that data was probably still OK on the harddisk.
I figured it would be a pretty easy job to extract the disk and slip into my external drive toaster. I’d popped disk out of Dells without much hassle previously. So, I popped off the access panel on the bottom of the laptop, hmm, all you can get to from there is memory. So, google’d for the service manual.
Oh, ok, the process is a little more involved:
- Remove battery
- Remove access panel cover
- Remove memory
- Remove keyboard
- Remove top panel
- Remove display
- Remove motherboard
No, sadly, I’m not kidding. 30 screws removed and many fragile ribbon connectors separated. All in all 75 minutes of fiddling.
After finally getting the disk out, we were able to successfully mount the disk on a different computer and extract its precious contents.
I speculate that the cause of death was a some shielding from a broken usb port making a dead short somewhere on the mainboard.
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